Hi Sandeep,

Important questions indeed...

Just to build on what Justin and Gerda have said, it is ultimately the data you that will help you ‘adjudicate’ between rival explanations and theories, which are likely to have been gathered from programme practitioners, managers, existing literature and your own evaluation interviews and process. In that sense it doesn’t matter that theories about how change happens are only drawn inductively from the context.

In a recent evaluation of a Cambodian disability and development programme I was involved in, there was not a lot that was explicit in the intentional design of the programme, but as Gerda notes, conversations with key informants in different roles in the programme, really helped to identify key avenues for exploration in so far as focusing in on theories of how change happened in the programme and related areas of secondary literature.

In fact my experience of employing a RE framework (which may differ from many others of course) was that it did involve the usual grounded theorising, based on increasing experience of the context, and growing awareness of issues from interviews and observation, but knowledge of relevant secondary literature did help sensitise me to areas of practice to push at further in the evaluation. And ultimately it was the triangulation of data and what they said about how candidate theories of change stood up, that led to evaluation conclusions (and a further refined theory of change).

As to the idea of a separate impact evaluation, I found that RE did involve more work around understanding existing literature and other programme experience than the commissioners initially expected (since it seemed to take attention away from the evaluation of the programme at hand), but using a RE framework does not preclude looking at the programmes own outcome indicators and how the programme fared on these - they are likely a useful part of the overall picture of data and how they do or don’t support particular theories of change (however embedded or implicit they are). It is just that RE takes you wider, into positioning the current programme and its evaluation, within a broader understanding of how change happens in related efforts and cumulative learning that is related.

Regards

Robin