Your search
Results 104 resources
-
How can donors and grantees work together to create effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practices that drive field-wide transformation?
-
designed to foster collaboration, share knowledge, and promote scholarship, this TIG is a division of the American Evaluation Association (AEA).
-
Inclusive and rigorous peacebuilding evaluation is both vital and complex. In this blog we share examples of how we are innovating our methodologies to move towards participatory and adaptive practice.
-
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...
-
This is the second blog in our series ‘Lessons on using Contribution Analysis for impact evaluation’. In our first blog, we introduced Contribution Analysis (CA) as an overarching approach to theory-based evaluation and the idea of causal hotpots as a way to zoom in, unpack and make the hard choices of where to focus evaluation research. Identifying specific links in the theory of change (ToC) with specific evaluation questions enables you to then choose appropriate methods. We have applied...
-
Over the past five years, colleagues from the Centre for Development Impact (CDI) – a joint initiative between the Institute of Development Studies, Itad and University of East Anglia – have been innovating with and learning how to use Contribution Analysis as an overarching approach to impact evaluation. In this blog series, we share our learning and insights, some of them in raw emergent form, highlight the complexities, nuances, excitements, and challenges of embracing new ways of doing...
-
You may, or may not, be surprised to hear that many theories of change lack what we might generally understand as a theory.
-
A critical appraisal's of CEDIL papers on Evaluating Complex Interventions... A study was recently published by the Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL) entitled Evaluating complex interventions in international development. This is the sort of title that raises great expectations. Complexity is a hugely popular theme and many of us are keen to know more about how to evaluate efforts that seek to achieve results amid complexity. In April 2021, CEDIL conducted a...
-
A fair amount has been written recently questioning the value added of theories of change. Have we gone through a hype cycle? Are they…
-
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…
-
Getting serious about systems change
-
In my last blog on theory-based Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL), I explained why relationships matter, and how to assess change…
-
About a decade ago, the development sector fell into the same trap the financial services industry did in the mid-1990s. We were all seduced by clever...
-
Andrea Babon and Lisa Denney explore how learning partners - a common feature of aid programs - can operate and feed into programs.
-
Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to organisational change which focuses on strengths rather than on weaknesses - quite different to many approaches to evaluation which focus on deficits and problems. "Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most...
-
A case study focuses on a particular unit - a person, a site, a project. It often uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. Case studies can be particularly useful for understanding how different elements fit together and how different elements (implementation, context and other factors) have produced the observed impacts. There are different types of case studies, which can be used for different purposes in evaluation. The GAO (Government Accountability Office) has...
-
Causal Link Monitoring (CLM) integrates design and monitoring to support adaptive management of projects. CLM helps project planners and managers identify the processes that are required to achieve desired results, and then to observe whether those processes take place, and how. Result-producing processes specify the causal links between results in a logic model or results framework—in other words, the processes between results. CLM focuses on how specific individuals or organizations use...
-
Contribution Analysis is an approach for assessing causal questions and inferring causality in real-life program evaluations. It offers a step-by-step approach designed to help managers, researchers, and policymakers arrive at conclusions about the contribution their program has made (or is currently making) to particular outcomes. The essential value of contribution analysis is that it offers an approach designed to reduce uncertainty about the contribution the intervention is making to the...
-
Critical System Heuristics (CSH) provides a framework of questions about a program including what is (and what ought to be) its purpose and its source of legitimacy and who are (and who ought to be) its intended beneficiaries. CSH, as developed by Werner Ulrich and later elaborated upon in collaboration with Martin Reynolds, is an approach used to surface, elaborate, and critically consider boundary judgments, that is, the ways in which people/groups decide what is relevant to the system of...
Explore
Theme
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
- After Action Reviews (1)
- Appreciative Inquiry (2)
- Capacity Development (1)
- Case Study (1)
- Causal Mechanisms (2)
- Circular charts applications (radar, pie, sunburst, spiderweb, orbic, etc) (1)
- Contribution Analysis (2)
- Critical Friends (1)
- Critical Systems Heuristics (3)
- Democratic Evaluation (1)
- Developmental Evaluation (2)
- Empowerment Evaluation (2)
- Ex-post Evaluation (1)
- Feedback Systems (1)
- Horizontal Evaluation (1)
- Impact evaluation (1)
- Innovation History (1)
- Institutional Histories (1)
- Knowledge Management (2)
- Logical Framework (1)
- Mapping Visualization Methods (3)
- MEL Bricolage (1)
- MEL in International Development (5)
- Most Significant Change (1)
- Network Analysis (1)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Outcome Mapping (4)
- Participatory Action Research (1)
- Participatory Evaluation (3)
- Participatory Learning and Action - PLA (2)
- Participatory Rural Appraisal - PRA, RRA (1)
- Peers/Peer-Group Review (1)
- Portfolio Management (4)
- Positive Deviance (2)
- Process Tracing (1)
- Qualitative Impact Assessment Protocol (1)
- Randomized Controlled Trials (1)
- Realist Evaluation (1)
- Rigour (1)
- Rubrics (6)
- Rules of Thumb (2)
- SenseMaker (2)
- Social Return on Investment (2)
- Success Case Method (3)
- Sustainability (1)
- Systemic Change (6)
- Systems Mapping (3)
- Theory-based evaluations (1)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (10)
- Utilisation focused evaluation (1)
- Adaptive Approaches [+] (15)
- Cases (1)
- Development Actors Perspectives (3)
-
Geography
(2)
-
Africa
(1)
-
Eastern Africa
(1)
- South Sudan (1)
-
West Africa
(1)
- Mali (1)
-
Eastern Africa
(1)
-
Americas
(1)
-
South America
(1)
- Colombia (1)
-
South America
(1)
-
Asia
(1)
-
Southern Asia
(1)
- Bangladesh (1)
-
Southern Asia
(1)
-
Africa
(1)
- Networks and Communities of Practice (1)
-
Practical
(3)
- Tools (1)
- Sectors [+] (8)