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For organizations committed to social change, advocacy often figures as a crucial strategic element. How to assess effectiveness in advocacy is, therefore, important. The usefulness of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) in advocacy are subject to much current debate. Advocacy staff, MEL professionals, senior managers, the funding community, and stakeholders of all kinds are searching for ways to improve practices – and thus their odds of success – in complex and contested advocacy...

• Donors are increasingly using portfolio-based programmes that embrace ‘good failure’ and adaptive, political programming. • However, measuring the impact of these programmes is challenging, especially for those working on policy influence and building country systems; not only do you need to measure the positive and negative impact of the overall portfolio, but also the different pathways tested. • Programmes, therefore, need a light-touch monitoring and evaluation system that allows...

Understanding and demonstrating the effectiveness of efforts to improve the lives of those living in poverty is an essential part of international development practice. But who decides what counts as good or credible evidence? Can the drive to measure results do justice to and promote transformational change change that challenges the power relations that produce and reproduce inequality, injustice and the non-fulfillment of human rights? The Politics of Evidence in International Development...

Institutional reforms are common across the globe. Think of efforts to build new governments in Afghanistan and Iraq; or decades worth of interventions intended to improve fiscal management, reduce corruption or introduce efficient public sector service delivery in African countries.These reforms often have limited results, however. They lead to new laws that are not properly implemented, and new organizations that have poor capacities and fail to function as needed. In this book, Matt...

Many rural poor and marginalized people strive to make a living in social-ecological systems that are characterized by multiple and often inequitable interactions across agents, scale and space. Uncertainty and inequality in such systems require research and development interventions to be adaptive, support learning and to engage with underlying drivers of poverty. Such complexity-aware approaches to planning, monitoring and evaluating development interventions are gaining strength, yet,...

Essential points for practitioners and donors • Mediation offers a cost-effective and proven method for resolving armed conflict. Between 1985 and 2015, 75 per cent of armed conflicts in the world were resolved through agreement rather than by force. In most cases these processes will have involved third party facilitation or support. • Professional mediators understand the high stakes involved in their work to prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict. In addition, they and their...

The UNDP has been exploring new approaches to M&E to better understand and address complex systems challenges. Traditional linear project-based planning and evaluation methods are insufficient for dealing with the unpredictable nature of such systems. The UNDP’s new Strategic Plan calls for a shift in M&E practices to align with the complexity of today’s global challenges. Key points from the blog post include: Learning and Adapting: There’s a need for continuous learning and adaptation in...

Dave Algoso and Alan Hudson at Global Integrity compare and contrast 9 different initiatives that are all heading in roughly the right direction in aid reform

Opportunities and challenges for local leadership

Unexamined and unjustified assumptions are the Achilles’ heel of development programs. In this paper, we describe an evaluation capacity building (ECB) approach designed to help community development practitioners work more effectively with assumptions through the intentional infusion of evaluative thinking (ET) into the program planning, monitoring, and evaluation process. We focus specifically on one component of our ET promotion approach involving the creation and analysis of theory of...

There are many definitions of the term ‘transformation’ or ‘transformational change’. The first section of the report develops a basic understanding of transformations or transitions (used synonymously) viewed from various perspectives. In this, transformations are defined as processes that use disruptive innovations to change systems into fundamentally new systems that subsequently form the new mainstream. Section two describes existing approaches to environmental and climate finance in...

Social accountability has become increasingly important to development programming since the 2004 World Development Report spearheaded its first generation of programming. In 2016, Thomas Carothers synthesized global experts’ perspectives on what became known as the second generation. With an evolving global context, new research and evaluations and tacit knowledge on how those assumptions played out in practice, the time is ripe for asking what the evidence since 2004 can tell us about what...

This article explores the challenges of monitoring and evaluating politically informed and adaptive programmes in the international development field. We assess the strengths and weaknesses of some specific evaluation methodologies which have been suggested as particularly appropriate for these kinds of programmes based on scholarly literature and the practical experience of the authors in using them. We suggest that those methods which assume generative causality are particularly well...

This paper reviews promising methods for the evaluation of complex interventions that are new or have been used in a limited way. It offers a taxonomy of complex interventions in international development and draws on literature to discuss several methods that can be used to evaluate these interventions. Complex interventions are those that are characterised by multiple components, multiple stakeholders, or multiple target populations. They may also be interventions that incorporate...

There are many definitions of the term ‘transformation’ or ‘transformational change’. The first section of the report develops a basic understanding of transformations or transitions (used synonymously) viewed from various perspectives. In this, transformations are defined as processes that use disruptive innovations to change systems into fundamentally new systems that subsequently form the new mainstream. Section two describes existing approaches to environmental and climate finance in...