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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...

A fair amount has been written recently questioning the value added of theories of change. Have we gone through a hype cycle? Are they…

This article explores the potential of using participatory action research as an adaptive programming modality to drive learning and innovation to tackle the drivers of (and seek to eliminate) the Worst Forms of Child Labour. We draw on our experience from early phases of implementation of a large-scale action research programme, which despite the constraints covid-19 posed in moving to full implementation and participatory engagement with children and other stakeholders on the ground, is...

Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require adapting or redirecting a variety of very complex global and local human systems. It is essential that development scholars and practitioners have tools to understand the dynamics of these systems and the key drivers of their behavior, such as barriers to progress and leverage points for driving sustainable change. System dynamics tools are well suited to address this challenge, but they must first be adapted for...

How to create the change you want to see in the world using the paradigm-busting ideas in this "utterly fascinating" (Adam Grant) big-idea book.​ Most of what we know about how ideas spread comes from bestselling authors who give us a compelling picture of a world, in which "influencers" are king, "sticky" ideas "go viral," and good behavior is "nudged" forward. The problem is that the world they describe is a world where information spreads, but beliefs and behaviors stay the same. When...

Evaluation processes that facilitate learning among advocates must be nimble, creative, and meaningful while transcending putative performance and accountability management. This article describes the experience, lessons, and trajectory of one such approach, Simple, Participatory Assessment of Real Change (SPARC), that a transnational HIV prevention research advocacy coalition pilot-tested in sub-Saharan Africa. Inspired by the pioneering work of the outcome harvesting (OH) and participatory...

The Cynefin Centre’s Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme provides tools for collective sense-making in the areas of community development and youth work; civic engagement and democratic innovation; collaborative service/policy design and evaluation; housing/tenant engagement; futures and planning; shared learning and peer to peer knowledge exchange.

This Toolkit This Toolkit presents an approach to network evaluation that is designed for network coordinators. This Toolkit provides guidance for network coordinators on how to: • More effectively use information they are already collecting as part of their routine coordination duties; • Collect other useful data that would support their network’s health and development; • Integrate network evaluation tasks into network activities, like convenings, to streamline the process; • Use data to...

This Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document is written for Small Foundation network partners. It accompanies Network Partner Evaluation Toolkit, which outlines four evaluation tools that Small Foundation is encouraging, and supporting, its network partners to use to improve their operations and, ultimately, increase their impact. This FAQ document answers typical questions about these evaluation tools and provides additional detailed recommendations for how network coordinators can...

Development cooperation has spent decades wrangling over the merits, evidence, and implications of what we may term “the learning hypothesis”: the idea that increased knowledge by development organisations must logically lead to increased effectiveness in the performance of their development activities. Organisations of all stripes have built research and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) departments, adopted a multitude of knowledge management systems and tools, and tinkered with...

When asserting the value of theory-based methods, you often here words like “black boxes” and “causal mechanisms.” These are commonly…

In this final blog in the series, I want to look at the potential value of rubrics. While evaluability assessments can help us to…

In my last blog on theory-based Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL), I explained why relationships matter, and how to assess change…

Abstract Background: Program logic is one of the most used tools by the public policy evaluator. There is, however, little explanation in the evaluation literature about the logical foundations of program logic or discussion of how it may be determined if a program is logical. This paper was born on a long journey that started with program logic and ended with the logic of evaluation. Consistent throughout was the idea that the discipline of program evaluation is a pragmatic one, concerned...

Development strategies, programmes and projects are designed making assumptions concerning several variables such as future prices of outputs and inputs, exchange rates and productivity growth. However, knowledge about the future is limited. Uncertainty prevails. The usual approach to deal with uncertainty is to reduce it to risk. Uncertainty is perceived as a negative factor that should and can be eliminated. This article presents an alternative approach which recognises that radical...

The term After Action Review (AAR) is becoming more common in the world of development evaluation, particularly in programmes that focus on evaluation as a formative learning process. As structured and facilitated learning moments, AARs take many shapes always built to support a specific team in a specific moment on their journey. Across such a diversity of practice how do we understand the evolution of the AAR as a method with an action research orientation? Being mindful always of the...

A-ha! A moment etched in my memory: 20 or so researchers were...

A recent conversation with a good governance programme in Myanmar tried to identify its underlying rules of thumb. Was that a good idea?

What can middle-level theory do? Middle-level theory (MLT) has several uses in development planning and evaluation. „ It helps predict whether a programme can be expected to work in a new setting. „ It offers insights into what design features are needed for success. „ It provides invaluable information for monitoring to see if the programme is on track and to fix problems that arise. „ It reveals the causal processes and related assumptions to be tested in an evaluation and helps identify...