Month: April 2021

Strengthening AIRCA Monitoring and Evaluation Systems

Agricultural research and development organizations are under pressure to have and report more impact. Integrated monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) systems can help, however they do not evolve overnight. MEL specialists belonging to the Association of International Research Centers in Agriculture (AIRCA) Community of Practice (COP) on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) have found that their …

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Innovation, learning and a doer’s manifesto

I was invited by the editor of Prometheus, a journal that publishes on innovation, to review a book by Luis Perez-Breva called “Innovating: a doer’s manifesto“. The review is published here. Much of what follows comes from the pre-print of the review. The reason the editor asked me to write the review was because 15 years ago …

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Evaluating complex interventions: principles and recommendations derived from experience

This article summarizes a paper written by John Mayne, Cynthia McDougall, Rodrigo Paz-Ybarnegaray and myself recently published in the journal Evaluation. There is a growing recognition that programs that seek to change people’s lives are intervening in complex systems, which puts a particular set of requirements on program monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Developing complexity-aware M&E systems within some …

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Learning to use Participatory Action Research and Theory of Change together

Most people agree that there are no simple solutions to tackling rural poverty and marginalization. Increasingly, programs that wish to do so are grappling with how to effectively engage in complex systems where outcomes are emergent, resulting from the interactions between different actors in pursuit of their own agendas. The emergent nature of change makes the outcomes …

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Do systems fight back? Some lessons from agricultural research in development

Do long-established systems have an immune system that helps them resist transformational change? If so, how does it work? These are important questions for anyone trying to change their organizations. If the system is going to strike back then knowing how and when that might happen can help save your initiative from being killed off. …

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Outcome Evidencing: A Method for Enabling and Evaluating Program Intervention in Complex Systems

How do you monitor and evaluate programs where some of your outcomes only become clear after the project has already started? This was the question that Rodrigo Paz-Barnegaray and I set out to answer when we worked for the CGIAR Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems. We needed an approach that could quickly make sense of how …

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Small-scale Farmer Innovation: How Agricultural Research Works Together with Farmers

MISEREOR, Prolinnova and McKnight Foundation, in collaboration with the editors of WELT-SICHTEN have recently published a dossier in German on small-scale farmer innovation (Baeuerliche Innovation). The English translation is now finished and available here. A farmer innovation in Burkina Faso showing how onions are stored to provide ventilation and protect the crop from heat “The articles …

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Agricultural Research’s Three Pathways to Impact

I have worked with the concept of ‘impact pathways’, or ‘theories of change’ for nearly 20 years. Perhaps the best advice I have received in this time is that theory of change should tell a good story.  A good story draws you in, it is compelling because it is about real people in real places. We come …

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