Reality Bites: Making Realist Evaluation Useful in the Real World

The international development sector faces many thorny and interconnected global challenges, from climate change and cross-border trade to corruption and violent extremism. This has sparked a growing interest in evaluation approaches that can cope with complexity and generate lessons about how to tackle these kinds of challenges. Through asking ‘how and why does this programme work or not work, for whom, and in what circumstances?’, realist evaluation can provide robust insights and transferable lessons about why programmes succeed or fail, which can help guide decisions about rolling out, scaling up, or trying out ideas elsewhere.

This seminar will present lessons from four large, multi-country realist evaluations of complex interventions conducted by Itad since 2013, as discussed in a newly published CDI Practice Paper. It will argue that realist evaluation can add value by enhancing the clarity, depth and portability of findings, helping evaluators deal with context and complexity in pragmatic ways, and providing helpful tools and lenses for implementers to critically appraise their programmes and generate learning. However, novice realist evaluators must navigate a number of potential pitfalls, especially in large-scale evaluations. Through trial and error, Itad has learned several lessons that may be helpful to others working in similar contexts.