Realist evaluation asks ‘how and why do interventions work or not work, for whom, and in what circumstances?’ It holds promise as an approach that can help evaluate complex programmes, and provide nuanced insights to guide decisions about rolling out, scaling up, or trying out interventions elsewhere. This CDI Practice Paper, by Melanie Punton, Isabel Vogel, Jennifer Leavy, Charles Michaelis and Edward Boydell, presents lessons from four large, multi-country realist evaluations of complex interventions conducted by Itad since 2013.
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See our latest impact evaluation work on the Itad, UEA and IDS websites.
Event
New Frontiers for Evaluation
As part of the International Year of Evaluation 2015 this conference will provide an opportunity to identify good impact evaluation practices and to build new evaluation coalitions for market-oriented development initiatives.
Event
Who Counts? The Power of Participatory Statistics
Local people can generate their own numbers – and the statistics that result are powerful for themselves and can influence policy.
Publication
Testing an Uptake Theory with QCA
Policy impact is a complex process influenced by multiple factors. An intermediate step in this process is policy uptake, or the adoption of measures by policymakers that reflect research findings and recommendations.
Latest publications
Institute of Development Studies March 2020
Realist evaluation asks ‘how and why do interventions work or not work, for whom, and in what circumstances?’ It holds promise as an approach that can help evaluate complex programmes, and provide nuanced insights to guide decisions about rolling out, scaling up, or trying out interventions elsewhere. This CDI Practice Paper, by Melanie Punton, Isabel Vogel, Jennifer Leavy, Charles Michaelis and Edward Boydell, presents lessons from four large, multi-country realist evaluations of complex interventions conducted by Itad since 2013.
Institute of Development Studies March 2020
This resource guide is one of a series of four developed to support researchers in international development with key monitoring, evaluation and learning processes, such as Theory of Change and logframes for proposal and project design.
IDS , University of Edinburgh and CDI November 2019
Upcoming events
6 September 2021 - 9:00am to 10 September 2021 - 5:00pm
Many development programmes have overlapping activities that are regularly adapted to changes in the context and result from collaboration with multiple partners. Traditional impact evaluation methods that measure differences in baseline and endline outcomes are not well suited to deal with this complexity. Contribution Analysis has emerged as a structured approach that is better able to address these real-world challenges. It consists of a step-wise, iterative process of refining Theory of Change and nested impact pathways. Subsequently, Mixed method research designs are used to verify the most critical and contested assumptions.
3 December 2020 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm
In recent years, international development programmes have increasingly sought to address complex problems, and this has led to growing demand for "complexity-aware" approaches to monitoring and evaluation. One key area of this frontier is the family of approaches known as theory-based evaluation. This webinar will argue that there is a need for combining theory-based methods to improve evaluation practice and shed light on causal mechanisms.
Speaker(s): Tom Aston
23 November 2020 - 12:30pm to 2:00pm
Our world is experiencing global volatility, unprecedented levels of humanitariancrises and vulnerability, coupled with the impacts of climate change, migration,inequalities, and constantly emerging threats to peace and security. Against thisbackdrop, the fallout from a global pandemic has left no country unaffected, with thepotential for a severely negative impact for many in the future - particularly those whoare most vulnerable.
Speaker(s): Peter Taylor
An introduction to CDI
Latest blog posts
Vicky Sword-Daniels, Emmeline Henderson, Chris Barnett, Dave Wilson
We urgently need a low carbon and climate-resilient future. Incremental adaptation may no longer be enough – transformational change offers the potential for fundamental change across and within complex and messy systems. There is significant recent interest in transformational change, but what does it mean in practice, and how can we know whether we are making progress?
November 2020
Richard Longhurst
“…evaluation tells us what works and what does not in a project or policy”. This simple description from the UK Evaluation Society (UKES) makes clear the absolutely vital role that evaluators globally have to play in assessing the impact, for example, of public and private investments on people’s lives. Despite this, the evaluation profession is still making progress in developing formal qualifications, and ‘anybody’ can claim to be an evaluator.
May 2020
Giel Ton, Dominic Glover
Giel Ton and Dominic Glover published the report ‘Improving Knowledge, Inputs and Markets for Legume Expansion: A Contribution Analysis of N2Africa in Ghana and Ethiopia’, They applied process-tracing to assess the contribution of the research programme N2Africa, which aimed to harness nitrogen fixation technologies.
January 2020