Volume 45. Issue 6: Rethinking Impact Evaluation for Development

Introduction – Rethinking Impact Evaluation for Development

This IDS Bulletin is the first of two special issues presenting contributions from the event ‘Impact Innovation and Learning: Towards a Research and Practice Agenda for the Future’, organised by IDS in March 2013. The ...

The Triviality of Measuring Ultimate Outcomes: Acknowledging the Span of Direct Influence

Sustainability standards and certification schemes have been promoted as a market?driven instrument for realising development impacts and receive public funding. As a result, companies, NGOs and supporting donors and ...

Process Tracing and Contribution Analysis: A Combined Approach to Generative Causal Inference for Impact Evaluation

This article proposes a combination of a popular evaluation approach, contribution analysis (CA), with an emerging method for causal inference, process tracing (PT). Both are grounded in generative causality and take a ...

Have Development Evaluators Been Fighting the Last War… And If So, What is to be Done?

What are the right evaluation methods and what evaluation strategy adapted to contemporary development issues should such methods serve? This article argues that a range of methods and tools must be drawn upon to achieve ...

Things you Wanted to Know about Bias in Evaluations but Never Dared to Think

The thrust for evidence?based policymaking has paid little attention to problems of bias. Statistical evidence is more fragile than generally understood, and false positives are all too likely given the incentives of ...

Some Thoughts on Development Evaluation Processes

A lively methodological debate together with organisational adjustments has dominated the international discussion on development evaluation in the last decade. Less discussed have been the evaluation processes, from ...

Making M&E More ‘Impact?oriented’: Illustrations from the UN

In international development, impact evaluation (IE) is becoming more and more an institutionalised practice. This article starts out by addressing the question of what institutionalisation of IE means and how it could ...

Developing a Research Agenda for Impact Evaluation in Development

This article sets out what would be required to develop a research agenda for impact evaluation. It begins by explaining why it is needed and what process it would involve. It outlines four areas where research is needed ...