Theory Driven Impact Evaluation:  Building and Testing Theories of Change. John Mayne.

The Evaluation Centre for Complex Health Interventions organized a workshop titled, “Theory Driven Impact Evaluation:  Building and Testing Theories of Change” on July 10, 2017. This workshop was led by John Mayne, developer of the contributions analysis evaluation approach.

This workshop was a two-part session on assessing impacts through theories of change involving John Mayne and Sanjeev Sridharan. This session highlighted why theories of change profoundly mattered in assessing impacts. It also served to introduce how impacts are assessed in two prominent theory-driven evaluation approaches: Contribution Analysis and Realist Evaluation.

John described what it takes to develop a good theory of change. Some recent advances in describing, representing and explicating theories of change of interventions were described with applications from nutrition and agriculture.

• Video of John’s presentation
• Slides from John’s presentation

Sanjeev argued that good theories of change needed to be testable and described ideas to test theories of change. His presentation highlighted realist evaluation approaches to assessing impacts.

• Video of Sanjeev’s presentation
• Slides from Sanjeev’s presentation