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This guidance note focuses on: • what an impact-oriented monitoring and evaluation system entails • why an organisation may want to establish such a system • when integrating an impact-orientation into an monitoring and evaluation system is most useful • what should be considered in developing the monitoring and evaluation system, or in tweaking an existing system, to become more impact-focused. The primary audience for this guidance note is internal and external monitoring and...

1. Background This internal stocktake assesses whether DFID is “getting real about politics” - how it is taking power and politics into account in all its operations. Country Poverty Reduction Diagnostics undertaken by DFID teams identify politics as the most frequent barrier to poverty reduction and growth. The UK 2015 Aid Strategy has committed DFID to spending 50% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in fragile states. This requires a “patient, long-term approach” to addressing...

The Strategic Program for Analyzing Complexity and Evaluating Systems (SPACES MERL) project is an activity funded by USAID’s Global Development Lab and the Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL). This three-year activity aims to bring a variety of tools and methodologies that decision-makers can use (alone or in combination) to provide comprehensive systems analysis. The activity is being implemented from 2015 to 2018 by a consortium of organizations expert in systems and...

Adaptive programming suggests, at a minimum, that development actors react and respond to changes in the political and socio-economic operating environment. It emphasises learning and the development practitioner is encouraged to adjust their actions to find workable solutions to problems that they may face. Being prepared to react to change may seem like common sense – and indeed it is. However much development thinking and practice remains stuck in a linear planning model which...

Two years ago, Jonathan Fox released a widely read and well-received paper looking at the evidence for citizen-led accountability.  In it, he noted the proliferation of short-term, isolated interve…

In 2012 the Danish city of Aarhus was appointed European Capital of Culture for 2017. The appointment was based on an ambitious programme that – under the headline Rethink – tried to set an agenda of societal transformation, mainly by seeking to increase the impact of art and culture, and to enhance civic participation at all levels of society. In this article we examine one of the first attempts of Aarhus 2017 to realize these grand ambitions: ‘The Playful Society’, a series of micro grants...

The article presents a yet unexplored framework for analysing the multidimensionality and dis/connections of participatory processes and their outcomes by using the concept of the ‘assemblage’ (DeLanda, 2006). The case is an eight-month collaboration between a task force initiated by Central Denmark Region, the socio-economic company Sager der Samler, and citizens. The collaboration is aimed at bringing together and working across various institutional and user perspectives to act on a...

Political Economy Analysis (PEA) is a field-research methodology used to explore not simply how things happen in an aid-recipient country, but why things happen. It results in a written assessment with recommendations for a mission's County Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS), project or activity design, or course correction during implementation.USAID's Applied PEA is a problem-focused method specially intended to be used by Mission staff to inform the design of aid interventions at any...

Traditionally, evaluation has focused on understanding whether a program is making progress against pre-determined indicators. In this context, the quality of the evaluation is often measured in part by the “rigor” of the methods and scientific inquiry.

ODI have just wrapped up an excellent two year project on ‘Women and power: overcoming barriers to leadership and influence’ with a final synthesis report that is well worth reading. It’s an intell...

The technological innovations of the last two decades – cell phones, tablets, open data and social media – mean that governments and citizens can interact like never before. Around the world, in different contexts, citizens have fast-increasing access to information and communications technologies (ICTs) that enable them to monitor government performance and express their views on it in real time. In February 2016, a learning event in Manila, convened by Making All Voices Count, brought...

• Impact is a multi-dimensional concept. Some definitions focus on very precise understandings of impact, while others cast a much broader net. • How impact is defined and used has a significant effect on the design, management and evaluation of development programmes. • Development programmes should hold explicit conversations with different stakeholders about how impact is used and understood, in order to come to a shared understanding. • There are six dimensions of impact that may...

In order to help enhance the effectiveness of donors and development practitioners on the ground, LASER has produced a range of practical guidance and tools. These are primarily intended for the international development community engaged in designing and implementing investment climate programmes, though can also be used more widely by other stakeholders across sectors. General guidance and tools: Politically smart approaches to donor investment climate programming (and annexes) Revised...

This CDI Practice Paper by Pauline Oosterhoff, Sowmyaa Bharadwaj, Danny Burns, Aruna Mohan Raj, Rituu B. Nanda and Pradeep Narayanan reflects on the use of participatory statistics to assess the impact of interventions to eradicate slavery and bonded labour. It deals with: (1) the challenges of estimating changes in the magnitude of various forms of slavery; (2) the potential of combining participatory approaches with statistical principles to generate robust data for assessing impact of...

Policy research projects face a number of challenges: policy processes are complex, involve multiple actors and often feature a significant time-lag between research and what may or may not happen as a result of it. To complicate matters further, the scope and scale of policy research projects are increasingly moving away from single research studies towards multi-component, multi-site and multi-sector endeavours. These factors mean that developing an overarching monitoring and evaluation...

This paper by Adinda Van Hemelrijck and Irene Guijt explores how impact evaluation can live up to standards broader than statistical rigour in ways that address challenges of complexity and enable stakeholders to engage meaningfully. A Participatory Impact Assessment and Learning Approach (PIALA) was piloted to assess and debate the impacts on rural poverty of two government programmes in Vietnam and Ghana funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). We discuss the...