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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...

Knowledge management strategies are important for firms’ competitive positioning. This paper examines how knowledge management codification and personalisation strategies are developed in response to environmental and organisational dynamics in an international non-governmental organisation. A longitudinal case study of the organisation’s strategic reformulation of its KM strategy over a 2.5 period is drawn upon. The research examines how pressures in the firm’s operating environment led to...

This commentary focuses on the difference between a theory of change and change theory, as it relates to systemic change projects in STEM higher education. A theory of change is project-specific and related to evaluation. It makes the underlying rationale of a project explicit, which supports planning, implementation, and assessment of the project. In addition, a theory of change is often required by funding agencies as part of grant proposals. In contrast, change theories represent...

This paper explores the thinking and practice of ‘action inquiry’ an embedded learning practice that can help navigate complexity when practising change together. The paper uses examples from social contexts where there are concerns about community wellbeing and health care. These are drawn from collaborative or collective leadership development programmes within public services that seek to bring new attention to the qualities of how people think, converse and interact, as part of their...

The investigation of causal mechanisms has the capacity to provide donors and implementing institutions with a greater understanding of people's reasoning and reactions as they work with interventions. This chapter contributes to the literature by identifying behavioral mechanisms generated through engagement with climate-resilient agriculture interventions within a larger livelihood project in Ethiopia. It works through the steps that enabled the study to unpack the black box between the...

This chapter argues that the credibility of causal mechanisms can be greatly increased by formulating them as statements that are both empirically falsifiable and empirically confirmable. Whether statements can be so depends on the potential availability of the relevant evidence (e.g., no evidence exists that can prove or disprove the existence of God, but good quality evidence is potentially available in many other cases). The Bayes formula can be used to measure the extent to which a given...

Applied agricultural research institutes play different roles in complex agricultural innovation processes, contributing to them with other actors. To foster learning and usable knowledge on how research actions influence such lasting innovation processes, there is a need to identify the causal mechanisms linking these actions and the effects of the changes they enable. A participatory, theory-driven, ex-post evaluation method, ImpresS, was developed by the French Agricultural Research...

Despite a wide body of literature on the importance of program theory and the need to tackle complexity to improve international development programming, the use of program theory to underpin interventions aimed at facilitating change in complex systems remains a challenge for many program practitioners. The actor-based change framework offers a pragmatic approach to address these challenges, integrating concepts and frameworks drawn from complexity science and behavioral change literature...

Realist evaluation has, over the past two decades, become a widely used approach in evaluation. The cornerstone of realist evaluation is to answer the question: What works, for whom, under what circumstances, and why. This is accomplished by explicating the causal mechanisms that, within a particular context, generate the outcomes of interest. Despite the central role of mechanisms in realist evaluation, systematic knowledge about how the term mechanism is conceptualized and operationalized...

Experimental evaluations—especially when grounded in theory-based impact evaluation—can provide insights into the mechanisms that generate program impacts. This chapter details variants of experimental evaluation designs and also analytic strategies that leverage experimental evaluation data to learn about causal mechanisms. The design variants are poised to illuminate causal mechanisms related to program implementation and the contribution of selected components of multifaceted programs....

This chapter explores the use of mechanisms within the realist evaluation of the Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) program, a £15.7 million initiative aiming to improve the use of evidence in decision-making in low and middle-income countries. The evaluation was commissioned to establish not just whether BCURE worked but also how and why capacity building can contribute to increased use of evidence in policymaking in the very different contexts in which the program operated....

Over the past decade, the field of development evaluation has seen a renewed interest in methodological approaches that can answer compelling causal questions about what works, for whom, and why. Development evaluators have notably started to experiment with Bayesian Process Tracing to unpack, test, and enhance their comprehension of causal mechanisms triggered by development interventions. This chapter conveys one such experience of applying Bayesian Process Tracing to the study of citizen...

Realist evaluation is an approach with a strong emphasis on causal mechanisms and the context in which they are triggered. However, recent reviews of published realist evaluations show that context is often understudied. This is problematic, as a thorough understanding of the relationship between context and causal mechanisms is crucial in assisting policymakers to make appropriate and targeted decisions that improve the intervention. Therefore, we set out to test whether combining realist...

Despite increased discussions in the community and a common understanding about the virtue of mechanism-based explanation, little is known about the true benefits and challenges of applying causal mechanism analysis in practice. This chapter aims to introduce the reader to the topic of causal mechanisms and synthesize significant findings on this special issue. It begins by laying out definitions and concepts of causal mechanisms in evaluation literature and proposes a two-way classification...