Self-Definition in Impact Measurement

Description

Benjamin Life:

"Traditional impact measurement typically imposes external frameworks on communities, reflecting what anthropologist James Scott termed "seeing like a state"—rendering complex social realities legible to distant authorities. In contrast, emerging approaches emphasize what scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call "refusal"—communities' right to define impact on their own terms.

...

These approaches transform impact measurement from a tool of accountability to funders into a process of collective meaning-making and knowledge generation. They recognize what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls "epistemic justice"—ensuring that those most affected by investments have the authority to define what constitutes valuable change."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/beyond-narrow-optimization?)

Typology

Benjamin Life:

"This shift from imposed to co-created metrics involves:

Community-defined indicators that emerge from participatory processes rather than expert determination. Projects like the Common Impact Data Standard demonstrate how communities can articulate success criteria rooted in lived experience while leveraging the legibility of interoperable digital data standards.

Cultural value frameworks that recognize what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai terms "the capacity to aspire"—culturally specific visions of the future that may not translate into universal metrics. Indigenous evaluation frameworks, for instance, often emphasize relationships to land and multi-generational well-being in ways that conventional social impact metrics cannot capture.

Power-aware evaluation that explicitly examines how measurement processes themselves distribute or concentrate power. As articulated by evaluator Vidhya Shanker, this approach asks "who defines problems, who defines success, who measures, and who benefits from measurement."

Narrative sovereignty that ensures communities control their own stories rather than becoming extractive data points for impact investors. Initiatives like the Open Future Coalition and Culture Hack Labs show how communities can build capacity to articulate their own narratives of change rather than having stories imposed upon them."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/beyond-narrow-optimization?)