In early 2022, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Learning invited the Effective Institutions Platform (EIP) – a program of the OECD – to review the Mediterranean City-to-City Migration (MC2CM) project in terms of how monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) can help capture outcomes from peer-to-peer (P2P) learning. MEL is an important component of the EIP’s work since 2020, and applying it to a city-to-city peer-learning initiative represented a new opportunity for the EIP.
The resulting report addresses the following questions:
- How did P2P learning take place in MC2CM, and what were the enablers and challenges to using peer learning?
- To what extent did MC2CM adopt MEL principles for P2P learning, and how can this be strengthened?
- How can MEL maximise the effectiveness of P2P learning in MC2CM and similar network-based projects?
Three main sources of information were used to answer these questions: (1) thirteen semi-structured interviews with MC2CM stakeholders; (2) MC2CM outputs, including P2P learning-event background documents, learning reports and thematic learning reports, city migration profiles, and a UCLG massive open online course (MOOC); (3) secondary literature and data, especially EIP and UCLG publications on P2P partnerships and MEL good-practice principles. Preliminary feedback on the report’s approach and results was gathered at the UCLG World Summit in Daejeon, South Korea, in October 2022.
The review focused on how learning took place and how to improve the uptake and impact of that learning, rather than on migration-related policy content. The analysis sought to identify individual learning by participating peers, and how such learning impacted political and administrative operating systems in city governance.
Learn more about the EIP and their partnership with UCLG in this video with Catherine Anderson, Head of EIP, and access the report through the link below.