Date: Thursday, November 5, 2026
Hello, I am Barbara Klugman, strategy and evaluation practitioner based in Cape Town, South Africa, focusing on supporting local and international funders, networks and non-profits in monitoring, evaluation, and learning.
In recent work in South Africa, I have been struck by the tension between communities doing everything they can to advocate and protest, but their concerns not being loud or big enough to garner attention and action of national politicians, corporations, or funders. It’s a tension between the importance of voice and lived experience against the forces of power that can influence national (government) and global (corporate) institutions to act.
South Africa is littered with multi-national mining companies that have purported to follow national policy requirements for environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and for community consultation but have followed shoddy methodologies, and often bought off a few people who claimed leadership roles in communities, thereby claiming to have fully consulted as required. Community groups get themselves organised, they challenge these putative leaders, they find pro bono public interest law firms who unpack what the law says and what options they as communities have from a legal perspective. Sometimes they go to court. Often courts find in their favour, instructing the corporations to redo their EIAs and conduct real community consultations, or instructing government to hold corporations accountable for following the law. But government officials seldom do as instructed by the courts, and corporations use their vast resources to redo their processes with as little and as cosmetic attention to the law as they can get away with.
Innumerable communities affected by mining have lost their land, or land and water have become too polluted for farming or cattle. Eventually the best that advocacy and legal support can do, is to push for decent compensation. But how can one ever compensate for loss of the land of one’s ancestors that forms the basis of community, family, livelihood and home?
From an evaluation perspective, I have sometimes found the conundrum of community members, non-profit allies, public interest law allies all talking about the resilience of the communities, the professionalism of the lawyers, the steadiness of non-profits who provide support as needed. Yet the victories are not mounting up. There are many small positive outcomes but almost none of the ultimate victories communities need to secure their health, livelihoods and futures. And these struggles go on for years and years.
What has become clear is that only when such affected communities get together with others similarly affected, plus nonprofits able to navigate the parliamentary system, plus well-funded lawyers able to push cases from lower courts to ever higher levels of the judiciary, do we start to see significant victories. This reinforces what we know about the power of movements in advocacy – that the deeper the community representation and the wider the alliances, the more chance of impact. Finding ways to link local issues to big picture issues such as environmental justice or climate change seems critical for advocacy to impact. And even then, for national policy change or court judgements to find their way back to each affected community may take longer than those affected can survive.
Evaluating local advocacy initiatives in such contexts means not just supporting those involved to identify what has worked and what has not and why at the local level, but enabling them to locate themselves and their issues in the bigger movements pushing for change.
I always alert my clients to the table and narrative on p30 of Coe and Schlangen: No Royal Road, “Typology of roles in advocacy joint working” which enables them to see and value their contribution as well as that of others in the pathways towards change.
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