Feb 25Randomista maniaSeveral years ago, when Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer won the Nobel Prize for economics I wrote a blog arguing that we shouldn’t spend too much time criticising Randomised Control Trials (RCTs). …Evaluation12 min readEvaluation12 min read
Jan 11The comeback of the case study?Bent Flyvbjerg’s article on misunderstandings about case study research reached 20,000 citations on Google Scholar last week, and it made me wonder if we’d reached a watershed moment. According to Google Scholar data, Robert Yin’s Case Study Research is the sixth most cited article or book in any field…Case Study10 min readCase Study10 min read
Oct 18, 2022SoupGate and the politics of good tasteEarlier this week, James Ozden wrote an interesting blog on Just Stop Oil throwing tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery. He pointed out that the video on Twitter has over 35 million views, and everyone is talking about it. Ozden questions how talking heads in the…9 min read9 min read
Oct 12, 2022Are sanctions the key to improve service delivery in social accountability programmes?In the past decade, a growing set of stakeholders have argued that mixed outcomes in the accountability field are, in large part, the result of weak or inexistent sanctions. It’s commonly argued that if only we could push for harder social sanctions or enforce more severe formal sanctions, we’d see…Accountability8 min readAccountability8 min read
Oct 10, 2022That’s an output, not an outcome“That’s an output, not an outcome.” In my day-to-day work, this is probably the most common thought in my head. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) folks tend to use it to school (rather than teach) non-M&E folks on something they supposedly ought to know, but don’t. …Evaluation12 min readEvaluation12 min read
Jul 3, 2022The politics of valuingThomas Schwandt and Emily Gates’ new(ish) book Evaluating and Valuing in Social Research is probably one of the most explicit attempts to look at how values and valuing shape evaluation. Despite the fact that “value” lies at the heart of the word evaluation, the evaluation field has had a hot…5 min read5 min read
Jun 22, 2022Balancing biases in evaluationI’ve read a lot on bias recently, and I figured it’s time we had an honest (and proportional) conversation about it. As Megan Colnar and I discussed recently, in 2020, the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs updated their Evaluation Quality Criteria. This…Evaluation10 min readEvaluation10 min read
Jun 5, 2022(Re)making the case for adaptive managementChristian Aid Ireland’s recent publication The Difference Learning Makes by Stephen Gray and Andy Carl made a bit of a splash. The study found that Christian Aid Ireland’s application of adaptive programming contributed to better development outcomes and supported more flexible delivery. …Evaluation10 min readEvaluation10 min read
May 31, 2022Are we learning to make a difference through adaptive management?A version of this blog was posted in the Thinking and Working Politically’s May Newsletter Christian Aid Ireland’s multi-country, multi-year Irish Aid funded Programme Grant II (2017–2022) in Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe was designed to support marginalised communities to…3 min read3 min read
Apr 5, 2022Method evangelists and zealots need not applyWritten with Megan Colnar In the last 20 years, evaluation methods for social change efforts have proliferated. What was once a fairly bland landscape is now a thriving field with dozens of methods ranging in application, purpose, and rigor. Better Evaluation identifies 26 umbrella approaches from appreciative inquiry to utilization-focused…Evaluation12 min readEvaluation12 min read
