Nov 4Embracing fuzziness in assessing complex change processesSuccess, failure, or both? In a recent must read blog, Howard White pointed out that ‘qualitative evaluation approaches find 80% of interventions successful whereas the consensus from effectiveness studies is that 80% of interventions don’t work.’ “Big, if true,” as the meme goes. White presents this finding as proof of positive bias in qualitative…Evaluation9 min readEvaluation9 min read
Oct 15Changing theoriesYou may, or may not, be surprised to hear that many theories of change lack what we might generally understand as a theory. I’ve argued in the past that at the heart of theories of change are “if, then… because statements.” What is so often absent from those theories is…8 min read8 min read
Jul 30The end of impactToby 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…Evaluation12 min readEvaluation12 min read
Jul 17Complexity and theories of change: reduxI’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…Evaluation11 min readEvaluation11 min read
Jul 5What 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…Evaluation10 min readEvaluation10 min read
May 29Evidence 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 read10 min read
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). However, I feel the need to break my own advice, because in the last year or…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
