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    • General surveillance program design, monitoring and evaluation guide

General surveillance program design, monitoring and evaluation guide

Following on from the Making General Surveillance Work project, ABARES has developed a draft Guide for Program Design, Monitoring and Evaluation of General Surveillance Programs. It provides step-by-step support for general surveillance program coordinators and teams to design general surveillance programs, including a monitoring and evaluation component.

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) offers a systematic way of supporting learning about where to best target efforts and investment, apply adaptive management, and continually improve programs. In addition, M&E provides program stakeholders with evidence about what their investments achieved. More broadly, M&E builds an evidence base of what is working and what isn’t in general surveillance programs.

Monitoring involves the process of keeping track of the progress of a program against what it intends to achieve and supports adaptive management to ensure program activities are responsive to issues and opportunities as they arise.

Evaluation involves a systematic investigation of program effectiveness, efficiency and appropriateness to determine merit (value) or worth (usefulness) of a program involving judgements about, for example, to what extent the program activities are achieving the desired objective(s).

The Guide will equip general surveillance program staff with tools that support key stakeholders to develop a theory of change that outlines how program activities will lead to the desired outcomes.

This becomes the foundation for the monitoring and evaluation components. The Guide is based on systems thinking; the Measurement, Evaluation, Reporting and Improvement (MERI) approach used in Landcare programs; the practical experience from past and present general surveillance programs; and M&E literature related to active surveillance and citizen science. It will be a companion document to the General Surveillance Program Guidelines, and contains various references to the General Surveillance Guidelines for more information.

The draft Guide was developed as part of Phase one of the project. In Phase two, now underway, the Guide is being piloted with four diverse general surveillance programs from around Australia.

These programs involve a mix of existing and new general surveillance initiatives. This phase will enable valuable feedback to the ABARES Social Sciences team to iteratively refine the Guide to ensure it is a practical and valuable document for general surveillance practitioners to facilitate continual improvement of their programs.

In return, pilot programs receive assistance from the ABARES Social Sciences team to improve their data and program management. The collaboration with the pilot programs and will continue during 2025-26 and the final Guide will become publicly available mid 2026.

For more information, contact Heleen Kruger, Jen Ticehurst, Scott Burrows and Md. Kamruzzaman

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Page last updated: 18 March 2025

We acknowledge the continuous connection of First Nations Traditional Owners and Custodians to the lands, seas and waters of Australia. We recognise their care for and cultivation of Country. We pay respect to Elders past and present, and recognise their knowledge and contribution to the productivity, innovation and sustainability of Australia’s agriculture, fisheries and forestry industries.

Artwork: Protecting our Country, Growing our Future
© Amy Allerton, contemporary Aboriginal Artist of the Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung and Gamilaroi nations.

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