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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...
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While many knowledge workers may fear that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will threaten their jobs, this article argues that small evaluation businesses should embrace AI tools to increase their value in the marketplace and remain relevant. In this article, consultants from a research, evaluation, and strategy firm, Intention 2 Impact, Inc., make a case for using AI tools to disrupt business as usual in evaluation from theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, AI may...
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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...
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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...
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Scholarly attention in innovation in the public sector is growing rapidly, provoking analytical complexity. We developed a systematic literature review about Public Sector Innovation (PSI), analysing 169 articles published between 2001 and 2021, using PRISMA. We present a comprehensive approach to PSI testing and empirically develop an analytical framework based on the most common combinations of the studied dimensions. Additionally, we propose three main research avenues for the future of...
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The United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) aimed to address global challenges to achieve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals through 12 interdisciplinary research hubs. This research documents key lessons learned around working with Theory of Change (ToC) to guide Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) within these complex research for development hubs. Interviews and document reviews were conducted in ten of the research...
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Evaluators who take a complexity-aware approach must consider tradeoffs related to theoretical parsimony, falsifiability, and measurement validity. These tradeoffs may be particularly pronounced with ex-post evaluation designs in which program theory development and monitoring frameworks are often completed before the evaluator is engaged. In this chapter, we argue that theory-based evaluation (TBE) approaches can address unique ex-post evaluation challenges that complexity-aware evaluation...
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Collective impact efforts must prioritize working together in more relational ways to find systemic solutions to social problems. Sometimes we lose sight of a simple truth about systems: They are made up of people. Despite all of the frameworks and tools at our disposal and all of our learning as a field of practice, purely technical, rational approaches to systems change will not make much of a dent in shifting power or altering our most deeply held beliefs. If most collective impact...
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Innovation teams must navigate inherent tensions between different learning activities to produce high levels of performance. Yet, we know little about how teams combine these activities—notably reflexive, experimental, vicarious, and contextual learning—most effectively over time. In this article, we integrate research on teamwork episodes with insights from music theory to develop a new theoretical perspective on team dynamics, which explains how team activities can produce harmony,...
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Realist evaluation and experimental designs are both well-established approaches to evaluation. Over the past 10 years, realist trials—evaluations purposefully combining realist evaluation and experimental designs—have emerged. Informed by a comprehensive review of published realist trials, this article examines to what extent and how realist trials align with quality standards for realist evaluations and randomized controlled trials and to what extent and how the realist and trial aspects...
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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...
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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...
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Technical assistance is provided to country governments as part of international development programmes to support policymaking or strengthen state capability. This article presents the conceptual evolution of ‘technical assistance’ linked to capacity development, starting with programmes aiming exclusively to enhance individual capacity in the 1950s to 1970s and progressing to complex systems approaches in the past ten years. It also presents some of the frequent challenges in designing and...
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Cooperation management facilitates the recoupling of progress toward sustainable development
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Amplifying the impact of sustainability initiatives to foster transformations in urban and rural contexts, has received increasing attention in resilience, social innovation, and sustainability transitions research. We review the literature on amplification frameworks and propose an integrative typology of eight processes, which aim to increase the impact of such initiatives. The eight amplification processes are: stabilizing, speeding up, growing, replicating, transferring, spreading,...
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Abstract Motivation On December 15, 2012 Sombath Somphone was abducted at a police checkpoint in his home city of Vientiane, the capital of Laos; his whereabouts remain unknown. This article considers his work and disappearance through the lens of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) approaches to development. The article is supportive of TWP, but emphasizes the significant risks of politicized programming in authoritarian contexts. Purpose By examining the case of Sombath Somphone, the...
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Achieving impact through research for development programmes (R4D) requires engagement with diverse stakeholders across the research, development and policy divides. Understanding how such programmes support the emergence of outcomes, therefore, requires a focus on the relational aspects of engagement and collaboration. Increasingly, evaluation of large research collaborations is employing social network analysis (SNA), making use of its relational view of causation. In this paper, we use...
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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...
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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...
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