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Thomas Aston
Thomas Aston

403 Followers

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Jul 30

The end of impact

Toby Lowe recently argued that ‘it is impossible for organisations to “demonstrate their impact” if they work in complex environments.’ Does this herald the end of impact evaluation? While I agree with several points Lowe makes about performance management, to conclude from these pitfalls that organisations should cease trying to…

Evaluation

12 min read

The end of impact
The end of impact
Evaluation

12 min read


Jul 17

Complexity and theories of change: redux

I’ve been reading lots of critiques of planning, prediction, and theories of change recently. I’ve written a fair bit on theories of change on this blog: on how to make theories of change more useful, the pitfalls of theories of change, the difficulties of distinguishing outputs and outcomes, the boundaries…

Evaluation

11 min read

Complexity and theories of change: redux
Complexity and theories of change: redux
Evaluation

11 min read


Jul 5

What is an intervention anyway?

I was recently discussing with Mario Picon and Kathy Bain about future work at Results for Development, and we got to talking about where development interventions begin and end. Mario asked “well, what is an intervention?” I’ve actually been thinking about this question for a while, and it came up…

Evaluation

10 min read

What is an intervention anyway?
What is an intervention anyway?
Evaluation

10 min read


May 29

Evidence portals to another world?

The promise of a Development Evidence Portal Some time ago, I read a very grand sounding blog: “A classification of interventions and outcomes for international development evidence.” This blog included an equally impressive sounding “Development Evidence Portal.” I originally wrote a version of this in January 2022 and shared it with the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation…

10 min read

Evidence portals to another world?
Evidence portals to another world?

10 min read


Feb 25

Randomista mania

Several 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). …

Evaluation

12 min read

Randomista mania
Randomista mania
Evaluation

12 min read


Jan 11

The 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 Study

10 min read

The comeback of the case study?
The comeback of the case study?
Case Study

10 min read


Oct 18, 2022

SoupGate and the politics of good taste

Earlier 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 read

SoupGate and the politics of good taste
SoupGate and the politics of good taste

9 min read


Oct 12, 2022

Are 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…

Accountability

8 min read

Are sanctions the key to improve service delivery in social accountability programmes?
Are sanctions the key to improve service delivery in social accountability programmes?
Accountability

8 min read


Oct 10, 2022

That’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. I suspect, more than anything…

Evaluation

12 min read

That’s an output, not an outcome
That’s an output, not an outcome
Evaluation

12 min read


Jul 3, 2022

The politics of valuing

Thomas 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

The politics of valuing
The politics of valuing

5 min read

Thomas Aston

Thomas Aston

403 Followers

I'm an independent consultant specialising in theory-based and participatory evaluation methods.

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