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 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...
January 2016
‘Impact’ in impact investing has been touted as bringing a new dimension to investing, going beyond investment’s traditional ‘risk’ and ‘return’ dimensions, and even becoming a new paradigm in solving society’s problems (Social Impact Investment Taskforce 2014a).
August 2015
As part of the International Year of Evaluation 2015, this Wilton Park convened meeting gave evaluation professionals, development partners, and investors an open forum to review recent evaluation experience, debate evaluation governance issues, and probe the methodolog...
July 2015
This background paper is a summary of literature reviewed on the topic of the evaluation of impact investments, and was prepared for the "New Frontiers for Evaluation in an Era of Market-Oriented Development" Conference, 20-23 July 2015. The literature was scoped using...
July 2015
This background paper, written by Robert Picciotto, was produced for the "New Frontiers for Evaluation in an Era of Market-Oriented Development" Conference, 20-23 July 2015.
June 2015
This workshop was supported by the Institute of Development Studies’ (IDS’) Department for International Development (DFID) Accountable Grant, with a view to start a dialogue around the use and application of ethics in impact evaluation.
June 2015
This background report supported an event hosted in January 2015 by the Centre for Development Impact (CDI) – a joint initiative between the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Itad and the University of East Anglia (UEA) – with the objective of opening up the debat...
April 2015
This CDI Practice Paper by Giulia Mascagni provides a critical assessment of the literature on tax experiments to date.It examines the main conceptual, methodological and data-related challenges, and provides practical reflections on how to move forward in low- and midd...
March 2015
With the increase in resources that organisations are dedicating to evaluation the issue of evaluation quality has risen up the agenda and a growing number of commissioners are now looking at how to ensure the studies they commission are of sufficient quality.
March 2015
This CDI Practice Paper by Melanie Punton and Katharina Welle explains the methodological and theoretical foundations of process tracing, and discusses its potential application in international development impact evaluations.
March 2015
This CDI Practice Paper by Julian Barr and Angela Christie brings together recent work at Itad to examine the origins of the concept of value for money (VFM) in the performance audit of public expenditure and its increasing prominence as a tool applied to support the ma...