Statistics and sports analogies Stretching back to How to Lie with Statistics, there are no end of books speaking to the limits of a statistical worldview. …

Getting serious about systems change In a widely read blog by systems guru Rob Ricigliano a couple of years ago on getting serious about how the systems change, I spotted a sub-section which I think deserves greater discussion. Ricigliano thoughtfully points out that “many of us have evangelized the need for systems change while understating…

A study was recently published by the Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL) entitled Evaluating complex interventions in international development. This is the sort of title that raises great expectations. …

#EvalSoWhite hasn’t exactly taken off as a hashtag, has it? I’m quite sure there were good intentions in its conception, and I’m also reasonably confident that the prevailing discourse in the evaluation field is moving in a positive direction. But, I can’t help but feel that little has change substantially…

Written with Florencia Guerzovich This is the last post of a 5-part series about scale in social accountability, and more broadly the transparency, participation, and accountability (TPA) sector. We started by discussing what scale looks like in the real world. We explained how, in our view, there is no single…

Written with Florencia Guerzovich How does scale happen in social accountability? We have argued that there are many pathways, zooming into three of those options: resonance, best practice, and resistance. In this fourth post in our series on the issue, we discuss context. We argue that context influences which pathways…

Written with Florencia Guerzovich This is the third post in a post series about how to shape and navigate pathways to scale in social accountability. In post 1, we explained that scale is a complex change process. We questioned and reorganized how practitioners and the literature view scale — a…

Written with Florencia Guerzovich In our previous post we previewed our forthcoming paper “How do we shape and navigate pathways to social accountability scale? Introducing a middle-level Theory of Change.” We discussed the dilemma of scaling up in the Transparency, Participation, and Accountability (TPA) sector, and particularly, in social accountability…

Written with Florencia Guerzovich Scale is a complex change process that is often misunderstood. We need to better understand what it looks like in practice, whether, how, and under what conditions (by whom, where, when) social accountability might be scaled up. …