Jul 3The 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 read
Jun 22Balancing 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 read
Jun 5(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. The much vaunted MUVA programme in Mozambique is…Evaluation10 min read
May 31Are 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 read
Apr 5Method 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 read
Mar 28What basketball stats can teach us, and what they can’tStatistics 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. We saw a resurgence of this line of thinking before the pandemic with popular books such as The Metric Society and The Tyranny of Metrics warning against the…Evaluation8 min read
Mar 18What, so what, now what?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…Evaluation8 min read
Feb 16Evaluating complexity, simplisticallyA 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. Complexity is a hugely popular theme and many of us are keen to know more about how…9 min read
Feb 8Levelling the playing field in evaluation methods access#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…Evaluation10 min read
Feb 2Scale up in time: How we evidence process and contextWritten 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…13 min read
