TY - JOUR TI - Theory amidst complexity – using process tracing in ex-post evaluations AU - Krueger, Kate AU - Wright, Molly T2 - New Directions for Evaluation AB - 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 (CAE) alone cannot, and that these two sets of approaches are complimentary. We will outline strategies that evaluators may use to conduct rigorous ex-post evaluations of democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) interventions that merge CAE's inductive approaches with a theory-testing structure. It will illustrate these strategies with two case studies of ex-post evaluation using process tracing (PT). DA - 2022/// PY - 2022 DO - 10.1002/ev.20524 DP - Wiley Online Library VL - 2022 IS - 176 SP - 119 EP - 128 LA - en SN - 1534-875X UR - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ev.20524 Y2 - 2023/04/13/09:21:48 ER -