This database of publications comprises outputs from our team and partner organisations that are relevant to the areas of work in which CDI aims to be active.
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 try...
August 2019
John Mayne discusses ways of assessing the relative importance of such causal factors, while arguing that there are likely no quantitative answers to the question. Rather, there is a need to carefully articulate the relative importance question, decide which causal fact...
January 2019
While contribution analysis provides a step-by-step approach to verify whether and why an intervention is a contributory factor to development impact, most contribution analysis studies do not quantify the ‘share of contribution’ that can be attributed to a particular s...
August 2018
Mixed methods approaches are widely used in impact evaluations, but all too often a ‘methodological gap’ emerges between broad, large-scale surveys and in-depth, small-scale qualitative investigation that can be difficult to bridge. In this CDI Practice Paper by Jeremy...
April 2016
Realist evaluation provides valuable insights into how and why programmes lead to change, and can generate transferable lessons to help practitioners roll out or scale up an intervention. However, as yet there are few standards and guidelines governing what counts as a...
March 2016
This CDI Practice Paper by Richard Longhurst, Peter Wichmand and Burt Perrin discusses how evaluability assessments (EAs) can support the choice of evaluation approaches for determining impact, drawing on recent experiences of the International Programme on the Eliminat...
February 2016
This paper by Adinda Van Hemelrijck and Irene Guijt explores how impact evaluation can live up to standards broader than statistical rigour in ways that address challenges of complexity and enable stakeholders to engage meaningfully.
February 2016
There is widespread recognition that mixed-methods approaches are a ‘platinum standard’ in research and evaluation and that the expanding availability of secondary quantitative data creates unprecedented opportunities for studying poverty and evaluating poverty reductio...
February 2016
This CDI Practice Paper by Pauline Oosterhoff, Sowmyaa Bharadwaj, Danny Burns, Aruna Mohan Raj, Rituu B. Nanda and Pradeep Narayanan reflects on the use of participatory statistics to assess the impact of interventions to eradicate slavery and bonded labour.
January 2016
A heightened focus on demonstrating development results has increased the stakes for evaluating impact (Stern 2015), while the more complex objectives and designs of international aid programmes make it ever more challenging to attribute effects to a particular interven...