Introduction

Both the day-to-day and the long-term strategic work of funders in the arts depend on a constantly evolving body of knowledge. Institutions engaged in issuing grants, awards, fellowships, and many other forms of support to artists and cultural practitioners need a nuanced understanding of the needs of those supported, the contexts in which they live and work, and the possible logics of change that might be possible in these contexts. The consequences of decision-making based on inaccurate or irrelevant information range from risking a waste of precious resources to actively creating or enabling harm (for instance, by distributing funding in a way that entrenches existing inequalities, or by pushing cultural practitioners into difficult situations in exchange for support).

The work of building or making this knowledge[1] takes place throughout the working processes of funders, and this knowledge in turn informs and shapes the work of funders at every stage. A flexible and nuanced understanding of artists, their work, and their social, economic, or political contexts plays a role in the work that is done by informing processes and ensuring accountability. As well as shaping the decisions that are made, this knowledge is passed on through reporting to whatever donors the funding institution itself is accountable to and forms the basis for most fundraising efforts.

Our discussion here of the knowledge-making practices of funders is rooted in our own experience working within funding institutions, and in particular with the Amsterdam-based Prince Claus Fund. Particularly through the long-term project Forces of Art (on which we reflect below), we became interested in considering funders’ practices of knowledge-making. These practices are constituted by techniques both of sensing (data-gathering, collecting, determining who has access to information) and of sense-making (analysis, synthesis, abstracting, putting-in-context).[2]

This work takes place at different levels of the organisation. Individuals working within these organisations bring, of course, their personal experiences and knowledge (and it is for this reason that internal diversity within institutions is so vital). Furthermore, every interaction between funding institutions and those they support, even the most informal, creates knowledge that is often passed on through conversation or hearsay.

Both sensing and sense-making take place most systematically, however, through the collection and interpretation of the planned reports required of beneficiaries, as well as surveys and (more rarely) interviews. This task, which typically goes under the unglamorous name of “Monitoring and Evaluation” (“M&E”), or some variation thereof, presents challenges on different levels, both practical[3] and epistemological. Within the day-to-day work of arts funding, we gather information on the work done with our funds and (to a certain extent) in our name. Next, we need to synthesise the information gathered into a coherent account that can help us improve our processes, meet our obligations regarding accountability and expected impact, and raise funds from our own donors. In recent years, we have come to understand more deeply that the knowledge created through this work should also be relevant or useful to our partners, their own practice, and be shared (back) with them in an overarching/holistic way.

Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World, edited by Carin Kuoni, Jordi Baltà Portolés, Nora N. Khan, and Serubiri Moses, 2020

While unravelling this central place of knowledge in the work of funders, we came to ask how the methodologies of knowledge-making typically available to funders, and the conditions under which they are used, shape the work of these institutions. A larger question has guided our thinking without us yet being in a position to answer it: what kinds of knowledge are funders positioned to develop, and from where do limits on this knowledge derive?

These concerns were behind the setting up of Forces of Art, an international research project that examines the ways in which artistic and cultural activities shape their own societies. It was initiated jointly in 2018 by the Prince Claus Fund, Hivos, and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), three foundations that support culture internationally. The goal in the first stages of Forces of Art was to avoid preconceived notions of “success” and impact and instead examine the ways in which art reveals its transformative force for and within societies. Fifteen academic and non-academic research teams from across the globe studied one or several cases that had been funded by one of the commissioning foundations between 2008 and 2018. All studies were conducted from each of the researcher’s own theoretical premises and using their own unique methodologies, including artistic research practices. The resulting book Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World is a multi-layered reading showcasing a multiplicity of voices and perspectives on how the forces of art reveal themselves.[4] While a summary cannot possibly capture the multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and insights from the book, we will share below in this article three recurring topics that were key to kickstarting a learning journey on translations to our funding practice.

With hindsight, we identify another driving force behind the Forces of Art initiative—opening up the ways that we as funders generated knowledge and insight, and in so doing, seeing our regular knowledge-making practices in a different, unfamiliar way. We have come to understand M&E procedures as attempted solutions to a basic epistemological problem, that of how funders can come to “know” the impact of their work, both on those they support and on the social, political, or economic contexts around them.

To consider M&E practices through this lens, we draw on Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges, which offers a way out of what she describes as “a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity” between supposedly disembodied objective knowledge, traditionally represented by the white male authority figure, and an extreme relativist position that views all categorical statements as expressions of patriarchal power relations.[5] Haraway frames her description of situated knowledge-building projects through the metaphor of seeing, appealing to the embodied nature of vision to describe objective knowledge as necessarily the product of perspectives that understand themselves as partial.

While these questions emerge naturally from the specific dynamics of the funder-recipient relationship, some of them seem to us to be most urgent in the context of funding within differentials of power and privilege. In particular, organisations based within the former colonial powers of the Global North that support work in the rest of the world must confront the fact that the position occupied by the European or North American funding institutions is precisely the one that has been assumed to be neutral and unmediated. The racist, patriarchal culture that has historically ascribed objectivity to white male perspectives similarly positions European or North American institutions as objective observers of those with whom they work in the Global South. As we wrote in our closing reflection to Forces of Art, this assumption of a neutral perspective can too easily be perpetuated by funders in their understanding of themselves.

For this reason, we find it important to attempt a description of how the funder’s perspective is situated, to problematize it to ourselves as well as to others. Such a description is necessarily incomplete but must begin from the geographic and epistemic distance between the funder which (like the Prince Claus Fund) supports artists and practitioners in the Global South while being located in the Global North, and those who receive funding from it. The funder's perspective occupies an ambiguous space between two constructed spheres:  the international art world and the world of so-called “development,” each of which comes with their own ways of seeing. For funders, this position can incentivise the flattening of creative identities for the purpose of “being fundable,” as Fatin Farhat points out in her contribution to Forces of Art.[6]

Meanwhile, the power held by a funder over those it supports, and its capacity to shape the lives of others with the tap of a keyboard, is a part of the conditions under which both sensing and sense-making take place. In this article, we argue that this position inevitably shapes the information that becomes known to funders, both intentionally through planned reporting requirements, surveys, and interviews, and ad hoc through conversation and hearsay. Furthermore, it shapes the ways in which this information is interpreted and synthesised to become part of the more general understanding funders have of themselves and their impact on the world around them.

In making these arguments, we are not speaking as disinterested investigators but as practitioners engaged in the work of knowledge-making from within a specific funding institution. The Prince Claus Fund has been supporting artists and cultural practitioners in places around the world where culture is under pressure since 1996, with a focus on socially engaged art that contributes to a better world. The Prince Claus Fund has since the beginning of last year moved towards a new set of strategic choices in terms of how we fulfil our aim of supporting artists. Instead of funding one-off artistic projects, with set plans and objectives, as we had done, we have moved towards investing in individual artists and cultural practitioners at different levels of their careers through three categories of Prince Claus Awards. These awards represent an un-earmarked investment in the development of our award recipients’ practices, without the expectation of specific productions or results. We see this new way of working as a shift away from a focus on the production of specific works towards an investment in processes.

This strategic shift on the part of the Prince Claus Fund has presented a wonderful opportunity and a challenge. How do we build and use knowledge, respectfully and collaboratively? How do the choices we make impact those we aim to serve? And what can we be doing to make our encounters with those we support safe and just, given the fundamental power disparity inherent to the dynamic between funder and funded?

The Forces of Art and the “M&E Gaze”
First of all, Forces of Art also helps in starting to formulate answers to some of our broader questions around what kinds of knowledge funders can develop and, specifically, what are the limits to this knowledge. The process of Forces of Art made possible situated knowledge-making that would not be possible in usual M&E practices. The research was conducted by more than 30 researchers from different contexts, who studied more than 45 diverse organisations that had been funded. Although the range of methodologies used was broad,[7] almost all were characterised by a collaborativeness far beyond typical M&E carried out by funders (or research consultants employed by funders). The result was a multiplicity of situated knowledge among many actors, places, methods, and agencies, disturbing the idea of neutral disembodied knowledge on a very practical level.

Next, Forces of Art answers our questions on how to build knowledge respectfully while doing justice to the transformative force of work done and created by artists and cultural practitioners. Firstly, the majority of chapters from the Forces of Art book highlight that an affective encounter is the key force of artistic work. Failure to properly account for this force may lead to the unfair dismissal of artistic practices. The question we then asked ourselves is: How can we learn to centre affective encounters[8] in monitoring and evaluations practices?

The second insight was around solidarity. Working in solidarity is based on the idea of shared beliefs, values, and goals between funders and funded. However, structures of power beyond that relationship complicate the goal of reaching solidarity,[9] especially when values are not clearly communicated. So, we asked, can a form of solidarity be reached between funders and the funded that circumvents or even undermines the aid model of the traditional development sphere? Finally, we realised that decentralised processes—as both physical decentralisation and the decentralisation of structural hierarchies—play an important role in achieving affect-focused practice and solidarity.[10]

The Forces of Art project and insights created a wider opportunity to have honest conversations about funding practices. Therefore, the Prince Claus Fund initiated a series of online learning sessions[11] in 2022, together with a group of nineteen funders from around the globe. Among participating funders, there was a sense of an urgent need to create a space of trust between different funders confronting these issues in their own contexts. As presented at the OnCurating conference “Speculations on Funding” (Kassel, 29 June 2022), we came to a set of preliminary conclusions that should immediately inform our practice and at the same time be regularly reviewed for their correct implementation and continued relevance. A recurring topic was that we need to acknowledge the type of relationship we are in and that this comes with certain power dynamics. We need to rethink how we can share power as well as risks. Sharing responsibility is at the core of a caring relationship, according to Barbara Lehtna, “when one sees both partners in a relationship as equally capable of sharing the responsibility of whatever happens next.”[12], [13] Related to insights on power dynamics, we realised that we needed to engage with art on its own terms. Instead of reading artwork through a simplistic framework of social impact, approach artistic work in its entirety as an aesthetic experience and process. Specifically, we need to be cautious of applying overarching global frameworks to fundamentally local questions without stopping to listen to where they might not fit. Therefore, we should make suggestions, rather than impose conditions, and leave room for unexpected interpretations, ideas, and concepts, instead of being prescriptive on content.

Recipient of Seed Awards 2023 Luis M. S. Santos, TV Contraption, 2022

Another conclusion from our structured conversations with other funders was that we realised that both funders and artists experience anxieties: among funders, this is driven by a fear of feeling out of control (about how money is spent and its impact) and artists—as we understood it—experience fears around budgets and imposed expectations.  How can we connect around these fears? One way forward is definitely to be clear and transparent in language: the jargon used within funding practices can easily be misinterpreted and is experienced as an imposition by many.

Finally, and this is what immediately led us to the core of this article, we learned we should treat monitoring and evaluation as a mode of knowledge-making and sharing, not of control.

Many of these points emphasise the importance of human dialogue[14] in order to improve our relationships, grant schemes, and M&E. Our funding institutions need to create space for that. Višnja Kisić and Goran Tomka, researchers in the Forces of Art project, advised: “Use funding situations as opportunities for honest encounters, for understanding, experiencing and searching for alternative ways to live and create, rather than developing or changing according to pre-set ideas, measures and standards. Because funding should be much more about changing oneself than changing others.”^[15]

The learnings from the Forces of Art initiative and subsequent conversations have opened up space within our work as a Fund and as a team (since 2021, renamed the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team), to find a deeper understanding of both our own needs and the needs of the artists we support. This process coincided with the Prince Claus Fund’s strategic shift from support for projects with definite outputs to investing in the process of artistic development, and new procedures were needed to help us build knowledge meaningfully and respectfully about the effect this new work would have on the people we hoped to support.

The research clarified our sense of something we are provisionally calling the “M&E gaze,” a totalising way of looking at artistic work that prioritises final endpoints over processes, and holds people to artificial standards imposed on them from outside, against which they are judged by disinterested observers looking from within centralised international institutions. It is this mode of seeing, we argue, that shapes a way of working in which monitoring and evaluation is a necessary evil at best, and at worst actively harmful or violent. This perception was reflected back to us in several contributions to Forces of Art. This gaze leaves little room for moments of surprise, playfulness, or contemplation, or for the collective creation of a practice and the unfolding of assemblages, as Nadia Moreno Moya and Fernando Escobar Neira put it.[16]

The pressure on artists to distort their work to meet the standards of this M&E gaze has harmful consequences for artists and artistic ecosystems—among others, it forces artists to invest time and labour that may be in short supply into applications and reports that do not benefit them, their processes, or their communities, and may even alienate them. It also creates a force within artistic ecosystems that disproportionately rewards those who are more able, or who are willing, to distort their work—at least on paper—into these formats.

The harmful impact of this gaze on artists and practitioners around the world is clear and has been frequently discussed. However, we argue that the limiting of funders’ knowledge-making practice to this way of seeing also stands in the way of funders’ own goals, creating blinkers that stand in the way of truly informed decision-making. Furthermore, its focus on unambiguously demonstrable effects of artistic production can produce impossible standards, facilitating the dismissal of artistic practices as not contributing sufficiently to a certain desired result.

Although a fuller description of the history of this mode of seeing is beyond the scope of this short article, it is worth stating that we do not believe that the “M&E gaze” arises spontaneously from funders. Institutions supporting artistic work on a global scale are faced with the pressure to justify their work and, in most cases, to fundraise for themselves from back-donors unlikely to be convinced solely by appeals to the inherent worth of artistic practice. They must therefore be able to speak about their work in a language that is legible to, for example, the broader international development sphere (much of which is still predicated on an uncomplicated “aid”-based model. There is a real risk of damaging relationships or losing access to vital funding if we reject the pressure to deliver “results” that are legible to these bodies.

While very real pressures on funders create the need to code switch, and use certain pre-set categorical languages, we argue for the need to problematise those categories. The M&E gaze as the governing mode of funders’ knowledge-making requires exactly the opposite of the situated knowledge discussed above from its practitioners. She or he must maintain an affect of objectivity, which becomes equated with professionalism within the working spheres of funders. Working within this mode makes it difficult, if not impossible, to access the affective encounters that are at the heart of artistic practice. Without the capacity to participate in these affective encounters with artists and with art, the observing eye of the funder misses the core aspects of its own work, leaving the knowledge-making project not just incomplete, but focused on the most trivial aspects of what is to be investigated.[17]

We argue that finding a way of doing monitoring and evaluation as a knowledge-making practice that is sensitive to the ways in which “the conditions of investigation shape what can be known”[18] also means developing a view of the system of funding in which we see ourselves as subject to the gaze of others, open to critique. If it is the case that there is no unmediated perceptual system, that all ways of seeing are shaped by the specific standpoint from which the seeing is done, what can be said of the kind of seeing that is done by an arts funder? We should search for a mode of perception that can perceive not the incidental but the core value of artistic work, while acknowledging its own perspective as partial.

Beginnings of New Practices

Almost by definition, developing new forms of collaborative knowledge-making[19] is a work-in-progress that will require a certain amount of experimentation. However, it is clear that whatever forms we might find should be rooted in collaboration with those we support. Collaborative knowledge-making might present an alternative to the blindly partial perspective of the M&E gaze, aspiring to a constantly shifting intersubjective network of knowledge, instead of an unattainable objectivity from nowhere. Following Haraway, we might see our situated perspective as a starting point for joining together with the perspectives of others, to “see together without claiming to be another”[20].” Such a methodology of knowledge-making could adapt itself to meet the needs of practitioners and allow for the resulting data to be held in common between funders and those they support. Mariam Abou Ghazi and Ilka Eickhof critically highlight the role of beneficiaries in both sensing and sense-making in Forces of Art: “How can we become a professional if we don’t have access to our data?”[21]

Forces of Art, with its inclusion of academic research methodologies like participant observation, (auto)ethnography, long, unstructured conversation, and artistic research—and above all its long-term perspective—was one of the key inspirations in developing our new M&E protocol. The process of working on the book helped us understand new ways of thinking that might be able to hold space for different experiences and perspectives, while minimising the burden evaluation puts on partners.

Our new protocol will combine minimal reporting with qualitative research in the form of personal interviews with a randomly sampled selection of the artists and practitioners we support. This approach will aim to focus the evaluative eye on ourselves, instead of on our partners. Instead of evaluating the work of our partners according to our own standards, we want to find ways to learn together with them. Building on our desire to foster long-term thinking, we want these conversations to cover a longer period than the short-term results imposed by the “M&E gaze.” At this point, we are planning on scheduling annual conversations with each subject over a period of three years. We hope this commitment will enable us to start to follow the impact of our work as it develops or dissipates over time within the complex systems of the arts ecosystem(s). We hope that these interviews will be informal and relational dialogues—spaces in which the people we are talking with can question and challenge us as well as the other way round, and we also want them to be spaces in which genuine affective encounters can take place.

The work of sense-making, of synthesising and interpreting the information gathered in this way must also be re-evaluated. Instead of centring linear stories of the philanthropic interventions of funders, we must seek to tell stories that illuminate the impact of our work precisely as one actor within a network of many perspectives and narratives.

Finding such a way to tell the story of what we do does not stand in the way of the practical needs that drive our knowledge-making—of informing our processes, being accountable, and raising funds from our own donors. These tasks must be done, rigorously and with care. But the burden of this rigour needs to be on us, not our partners, and it should not be in the way of finding the unexpected.

Conclusion

Reframing the day-to-day work of monitoring and evaluation as a situated knowledge-making project opens up the possibilities of new methodologies and aims. The specific positionality of the Prince Claus Fund, a funder of artistic work across the majority world, located in and observing from one of the former colonial powers of western Europe, makes understanding the limitations of our knowledge essential. If we are sensitive to the ways in which the conditions of doing M&E shape what knowledge can be derived from it, we can develop more collaborative methods of coming to understand our own work. Such methods would help to reshape power relations between funders and funded, make space for affects and solidarities, and lead towards more vibrant creative forces rather than flattening creative identities.

At the same time, we can develop a view of the system of funding in which we see ourselves as one part among many, subject to the gaze of others. However well imagined, good policies are meaningless unless they are implemented in the right spirit. The spirit we want to embody is to always be learning, to be as transparent as needed, not to be a burden on our partners, but evaluating ourselves as opposed to those we support. The research and conversations that led to this contribution took place on and off in more closed funder circles and are continuing with artists, practitioners, and researchers. We are talking about relationships between funders and beneficiaries that are sometimes very intimate or personal, and therefore all the more should be shaped by both. Where we are now still represents the beginning of a process.

Acknowledgments

We would like to greatly thank Forces of Art researchers and independent scholars Visnja Kisic, Assistant Professor, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Management, University of Arts Belgrade; Goran Tomka, Associate Professor, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Management, University of Arts Belgrade; and Mark Westmoreland, Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, for reviewing this article, as well as Mette Gratama van Andel and all our colleagues at the Prince Claus Fund and elsewhere who helped us think through these ideas.

Laura Alexander is the coordinator of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning at the Prince Claus Fund, where she is responsible for the collecting and analysing of information on the impact of the Fund. She is particularly focused on developing collaborative ME&L practices that provide insight into the needs of practitioners working at the intersection of arts and societal change based on the relationships between the organisation and its partners, and on critical reflection on the position and power of funding bodies in society. Laura began her career at the Prince Claus Fund in 2017 as a researcher, and was a core member of the working group for the Forces of Art project. During this time she also completed a master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

Myriam Vandenbroucke works as an independent consultant in the field of impact research and impact management, to contribute to the development of initiatives at the intersection of art, culture and societal opportunities. Her research centers around the question how the transformative force of art can be revealed and varies from more classical evaluations to learning journeys. After her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience (2008), Myriam Vandenbroucke gained experience as a researcher in a wide range of sectors and institutions, from the arts sector, to juvenile detention centers, government, trade unions and the UN. She worked in several countries in Africa, the Middle East, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. As a Monitoring and Evaluation officer in the Resources of Open Minds programma (2017 - 2020), she got acquainted with the role of arts in freedom of expression and was a core member of the working group for the Forces of Art project.