Non‐Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are increasingly challenged to demonstrate accountability and relevance, with reporting, monitoring and evaluation arguably having become development activities in their own right. Drawing on interviews and observation research, this article examines the impact of intensified monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements on a number of South African NGOs. M&E — and the types of expertise, vocabularies and practices it gives rise to — is an important area that is usually neglected in the study of NGOs but that significantly impacts on NGOs’ logic of operation. By focusing on three areas — data that are considered appropriate to conduct M&E, staffing and organizational cultures, and NGOs’ reformist relationships with other civil society organizations (CSOs) — M&E is revealed as a central discursive element in the constitution of NGOs appropriate to neoliberal development. By engaging a neo‐Foucauldian framework of governmentality, M&E practices are thus understood as technologies through which governing is accomplished in the trans‐scalar post‐apartheid development domain.

Natascha Mueller-Hirth 2Researchers in peace and conflict studies have rarely explicitly engaged with time and temporality. This article develops a temporal analysis of victimhood in a mature posttransition society, drawing on qualitative research with victims/survivors of gross human rights violations in South Africa. Two decades after the democratic transition, there is a prevalent understanding that it is finally time for victims to "move on." In contrast to the supposed linear temporality of peace processes, however, the consequences of past violence continue to impact on interviewees' lives and are exacerbated by contemporary experiences of victimization. I identify several areas of temporal conflicts that characterize postconflict societies: victimhood as temporary/victimhood as continuous; the pace of national reconciliation/the time(s) of individual healing; and the speed of a neoliberal economy/the pace of social transformation. I examine temporal hierarchies that reflect broader socioeconomic marginalization, such as being made to wait for compensation and social pressures of overcoming the past. This temporal analysis of victimhood thus not only highlights the mismatch between victims' needs and political and cultural expectations of closure, but it also draws attention to the temporality of transitional processes and programs at different social and institutional levels.

While previous literature has examined time discourses in social work and demonstrated that social work is predicated on linear understandings of time, one area that has received little theoretical and empirical attention in the literature on time and social work is what effects various social work temporalities exert on the lifeworld of social workers and how they shape their working days. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with British social workers and employs an abductive approach to data analysis. By analysing the participants' experiences of time and work, the article identifies two temporalities that exist in social work practice, paperwork time and compassionate time. Paperwork time is linear, instantaneous and accelerated, requiring social workers to juggle multiple competing demands and needs. Compassionate time is slower and more developmental and cyclical and requires slower engagement. The paper then discusses how social workers negotiated these contradictory temporalities and highlights the potentially negative effects of temporal conflicts on people's health, well-being and on social work practice at large.

This article explores why landscape is a crucial element in researching the relationship between environment and wellbeing. The main point we make is that human social agents are embedded in particular landscapes and it is in landscapes that environmental changes are experienced, which can have implications for wellbeing. We draw from a variety of perspectives on landscape that understand a fundamental creative relation between humans and landscape and recent developments in neomaterialism theorizing. Landscape is understood here as an assemblage of different forms of matter, animate and inanimate objects, as well as symbolic and cultural processes. A case study is also presented to indicate how landscape can be studied in relation to environment and change. Using the conceptual ideas laid out in the first section of the article we analyse landscape, environment and wellbeing in Xuan Thuy National Park in north Vietnam. The area is part of a precarious coastal region where extreme weather events have impacted on the wellbeing of both humans and other matter. The paper concludes with suggestions on the use of this landscape approach in researching environment and wellbeing.

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