Senior Consultant, MEL Specialist for Climate Resilience and Sustainability Practice

Oxford Policy Management is seeking a Senior Consultant, MEL Specialist for its Climate Resilience and Sustainability Practice in New Delhi, India. This role focuses on providing technical expertise in Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) related to climate adaptation and sustainability. Responsibilities include leading MEL initiatives, supporting project delivery, mentoring teams, and enhancing OPM's reputation in the field. The position requires strong leadership and relationship-building skills.
The Climate, Resilience and Sustainability (CRS) Practice's objectives are to provide research, policy formulation, organizational reform, and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) expertise that support our clients in delivering meaningful change. We work in the areas of climate adaptation and mitigation, climate policy and finance, natural resource management and environmental conservation, urban policy and planning, and green growth and energy. Our work supports the public sector, international and national institutions, governments, and private sector actors to deliver on their goals.

The position of Senior Consultant, MEL Specialist is responsible for supporting the MEL work of the CRS Practice, providing support to the Practice’s strategic direction as well as high-level technical support across the Practice with regard to business development, effective and impactful project delivery, and mentorship of Practice teams.

The role will provide technical expertise across a range of MEL, specifically related to outcome and impact evaluations, emerging and innovative evaluation methods (such as AI, outcome harvesting, complexity-aware and systems-based evaluations, etc.), and learning partnerships. The role with strengthen OPM’s knowledge, internal learning, and business development opportunities by bringing skills and expertise to the newly formed CRS Climate MEL group.

Reporting to the Senior Consultant and MEL Lead for the Practice, the role will support the further development of a strategic direction for the Practice as well as the development of staff skills and capacities that will improve OPM’s reputation and standing in the market.

The role will require technical, team, and project leadership experience. It will also require innovative and independent problem solving, an ability to effectively build relationships with clients and other external actors within wider communities of practice, leadership in identifying opportunities and leading quality proposals to win impactful work, and an ability to build effective internal relationships and support other OPM colleagues in developing their MEL skills and expertise.

As a Senior Consultant at OPM you will:
• Develop, lead and promote OPM’s work on MEL to build future work, deliver existing projects and program, contribute to OPM’s internal learning, and ensuring a robust pipeline of future work.
• Lead and deliver technical work on MEL across the Practice, and provide technical support to others. This could involve research, facilitating workshops, providing capacity training, managing relationships with clients and partners, analyzing data, writing evaluation reports and presentations, and developing learning strategies.
• Represent OPM externally, build and manage relationships, and network to increase OPM’s visibility and role in MEL in this space.
• Oversee and manage teams of technical experts working on projects (OPM, consortium and external consultant inputs) while achieving financial targets and client reporting.
• Contribute to problem solving around project delivery by developing new or improved approaches. Ensure teams are supported in dealing with such issues, share learnings and ideas for the overall benefit of the project and OPM, e.g. by conducting learning workshops to reflect on program implementation.
• Ensure that program inputs and deliverables are defined and delivered on time and to quality standards, providing everyday support to Team Leader and Project Director. Ensure effective use of and collaboration with OPM administrative, HR, legal, and finance support systems and staff.
• Provide effective mentoring to more junior staff on MEL-related topics to ensure the continued development of staff skills and expertise.
• Be an integral part of the CRS Practice, and engage across other relevant OPM teams to define, develop and deliver opportunity pipelines for key clients in line with portfolio acquisition and diversification targets. This will range across identifying opportunities, pre-positioning, partnership development, bid writing and submission, and ensuring a distinctive offer to provide substantial positive impact with our work.
• Build upon existing external networks by identifying and building relationships with key external organizations, associates and external consultants that share our values and complement our skills in MEL, building up our database and linking to other relevant Practices.

Key Qualifications / Experience / Skills / Behaviors
• A Master’s or other post-graduate degree in relevant discipline
• Substantial relevant work experience in MEL, ideally with experience of:
• Evaluation approach development, including theory-based evaluation
• MEL systems development
• Innovative evaluation qualitative and quantitative methods, including participatory evaluations, contribution analysis, outcome harvest, and process tracing
• Value for money (VfM) frameworks, methods and approaches
• Complexity-aware, systems-focused, and developmental evaluation
• Adaptive programming
• Learning approaches and practices
• Awareness of ICF indicators and targets
• MEL work in sectors such as natural resource management, sustainable land use, biodiversity conservation, climate adaptation and resilience, climate security, environmental peacebuilding, green growth, the green energy transition, and urban resilience
• Ongoing engagement with relevant communities of practice
• Experience in the development of project plans, priorities and processes to achieve objectives, including managing budgets, resources and risks
• Demonstrated ability to manage time effectively in a busy environment.
• Strong bidding and proposal management skills, which includes proven ability in actively prepositioning for strategically important and impactful projects and developing clear strategy for submitting winning proposals
• Work experience in developing and emerging markets, ideally within a consulting firm, NGO, think-tank, multilateral or government agency
• Ability to effectively communicate verbally and in writing with colleagues and clients
• Experience working with diverse teams
• Ability to quickly shift between tasks and to manage competing priorities while constantly delivering quality work

Our Offer:
• We enable colleagues’ capacity to grow professionally through enhanced learning resources, opportunities to work cross functionally, and space to engage with a range of internal and external industry events.
• Our non-hierarchical culture values support, collaboration, intellectual curiosity, and a rich diversity of perspectives.
• We provide an exceptionally generous annual leave entitlement and a hybrid working model to encourage and enable healthy work/life balance.
• Wellbeing resources including a global Employee Assistance Programme and access to the UnMind app.
• Competitive salary and contributory pension scheme.

We are strengthened by the diversity of colleagues across our global business and are committed to being an equal opportunities employer, promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace for all.

Our recruitment practices reflect our ambition to make the international development sector more inclusive and firm belief that our work delivers the best outcomes when we actively include a diversity of perspectives and experiences.