In many Brazilian cities, residents spontaneously organize to collectively manage spaces, services, or resources: community gardens, building occupations, and cultural or solidarity-based initiatives. These practices, often referred to as “urban commons,” reflect strong civic engagement in Brazil, yet they remain insufficiently recognized by institutions. The current legal framework primarily favors public–private partnerships, often associated with the privatization of urban services.

In Italy, several cities have found concrete responses to this challenge. Since the 2000s, municipal regulations have enabled citizens to officially collaborate with authorities to take care of urban commons (public spaces, facilities, and heritage). More than 200 cities have adopted this model, which provides a legal framework without commodifying the spaces, resources, and services concerned.

It is within this context that this research project takes place. It is conducted in two cities in the state of Goiás, where strong community dynamics already exist (associations, rural communities, and cultural initiatives). More broadly, the project aligns with AFD’s research priorities on commons and citizen participation. It also contributes to AFD’s broader priorities related to strengthening local governance, citizen participation, social cohesion, and sustainable development.

Read also : How can the Commons approach transform Brazil?

The central research question is: how to create an institutional framework that recognizes and supports these citizen-led practices without turning them into purely market-based services?

To address this, the project seeks to understand how residents in the cities of Goiânia and Goiás collectively take care of their spaces and resources. It also aims to equip local stakeholders with solutions—particularly legal tools—inspired by the Italian experience but adapted to the Brazilian context.

This will take the form of a mapping of local initiatives, the organization of workshops with relevant stakeholders, and the development of a proposed municipal regulation on urban commons. These outputs can help local authorities better support grassroots initiatives, strengthen citizen participation, and develop more inclusive public policies at lower cost.

The project is based on an action-research approach: in addition to fieldwork, interviews, and observations, the research teams organize participatory workshops with residents, associations, and local authorities. A collaborative mapping exercise will document existing practices, while case studies will enable comparisons between Brazilian and Italian experiences. In a second phase, workshops will support the co-construction of concrete initiatives with local stakeholders, and seminars will foster dialogue between researchers, citizens, and policymakers.

The project draws on the expertise of two partners, the Federal University of Goiás and the Polytechnic University of Turin (Politecnico di Torino — PoliTo), as well as the experience developed within the Italian laboratory LABSUS, which specializes in regulations on commons. Local partners (civil society organizations and municipalities) are fully involved.

In addition to scientific outputs, the project includes capacity-building activities for local partners through workshops and collaborative work. It will also deliver several outputs directly useful for local authorities:

• A collaborative mapping of urban commons practices 
• A practical guide with a toolkit for local stakeholders 
• A pilot project co-constructed with a citizen initiative 
• A policy brief proposing a regulation on urban commons

A range of activities will support the dissemination of these tools and results: exhibitions and public events, an online platform, publications.

These outputs will provide local authorities with concrete levers to better support urban commons and will contribute to the broader debate on participatory urban policies in Brazil.

The teams are engaged in a collective dynamic led by La Coop des Communs, the Casa Comum platform, and AFD. The objective is to build a transnational learning community by sharing ongoing work, capitalizing on each other’s experiences, and producing knowledge on the links between commons, citizen participation, and the transformation of public action.This network brings together complementary profiles—researchers, civil society actors, and public decision-makers involved in these initiatives—from Brazil, Colombia, and Europe. Supported by meetings held in Brazil and Italy, this dynamic will lead to a collective publication, currently in preparation, which will compare and contextualize the various research projects undertaken.

Public decision-makers are increasingly encouraged to rely on research-based evidence to design effective policies. However, in practice, scientific findings struggle to circulate beyond the academic world: they often arrive too late, are written in language that is not easily accessible outside academic circles, or are poorly suited to the concrete challenges faced by public actors.

At the same time, projects that foster dialogue between researchers and policymakers are complex to implement and evaluate: they must constantly adapt to shifting political contexts and produce diffuse or indirect effects that are not easily measured. Traditional monitoring and evaluation tools, centred on quantitative indicators, rigid frameworks and logical matrices, fail to capture these dynamics effectively. They are primarily used for accountability to donors, rather than for collective learning or project adaptation.

AFD supports numerous research projects aimed at informing public action. Observing this gap between researchers and policymakers, it sought to develop a monitoring and evaluation method that is more useful, more flexible, and better suited to these projects, in order to improve the measurement of their real impact and strengthen the influence of research on public policy.

The project consisted of designing a monitoring and evaluation method specifically tailored to initiatives that connect research and public action. It addresses a twofold challenge: tracking the real effects of these projects over time, and helping stakeholders in managing them more effectively in uncertain and shifting contexts.

Rather than limiting itself to a purely accounting-based quantification of activities or formal outputs (number of reports, workshops or publications), the method focuses above all on the changes the project has helped set in motion: have trust-based relationships been built? Are the knowledge outputs being mobilised? Are practices and modes of collaboration evolving? Underlying this is a threefold objective: to better understand what truly works by identifying relevant signals of change; to produce useful information for adjusting strategies during project implementation (identifying obstacles, reinforcing effective actions); and to improve the formulation of public policy recommendations.

This approach contributes to enhancing the quality of public decisions by promoting a more concrete, more practical, consistent, and targeted use of scientific knowledge.

The project resulted in a research paper, a technical report, and a monitoring and evaluation toolkit designed for development practitioners.

This method was tested on real-world research projects and co-developed with the various types of stakeholders involved, in order to capture their respective needs and constraints: researchers and public institutions, but also local organisations, civil society actors, and donors.

The approach is intentionally light and adaptable, allowing it to fit the time and resource constraints of partners, particularly in countries of the Global South. Local stakeholders are fully involved in data collection, interpretation, and the adjustment of actions. In practice, the method combines collective workshops, simple data collection tools (interviews, testimonials, observations), and moments of shared analysis. It draws in particular on the "theory of change", a tool that enables a team to clarify the expected outcomes of a project, the intermediate steps required, and the conditions for success.

The monitoring and evaluation method was tested across around ten projects in North Africa, Madagascar and the Sahel region, before being deployed across other geographies. It led to the following results:

• Exchanges between researchers, policymakers and local partners enabled the dissemination of findings and the sharing of lessons learned.
• Institutional and academic partners strengthened their capacities in monitoring and evaluation, policy dialogue facilitation, and project impact analysis.
• In several cases, the approach helped adjust strategies during implementation and improve the formulation of recommendations for policymakers. In doing so, it contributed to a more structured, better informed and more sustainable dialogue between research and public action.

This approach advances thinking on the use of research in public action by demonstrating that effective monitoring and evaluation can serve as a strategic management tool, rather than merely a control mechanism. It highlights the need to strengthen local capacities in monitoring and evaluation, as well as skills in facilitating dialogue between science and public decision-making.

However, some questions remain regarding the sustainability of the observed effects and the ability to scale up the approach. Further experimentation is underway to consolidate the methodology and adapt it to other contexts. The toolkit will also soon be deployed in the context of macroeconomic modelling projects, illustrating the approach’s strong thematic adaptability—one of its key added values.

• Stéphanie Leyronas
• Camille Tchounikine
• Annabelle Moreau Santos
• Sophie Salomon