Good things happen in the short term and bad things happen in the long term

This is a long title but I love that sentence, culled from Elliot Stern’s intervention on the Benefits and Barriers to Evaluation Use at the recent evaluation conference in Paris. The one-day conference, convened jointly by the European Evaluation Society, France’s evaluation society, the United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), took place at the quite extraordinary UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

What is a sound theory of change?

The term "theory of change" (ToC) has established itself in the development world. Agencies invite consultants (including your blogger) to facilitate workshops which would help them develop the theory of change for a particular programme; donors ask prospective grantees to come with a sound theory of change; evaluators (including your blogger) bemoan the absence thereof. There are companies which have developed theory of change software and dedicated websites that propose to help you build your own ToC. The picture below shows a fraction of what I get when I ask a popular search engine to find images of "theory of change": 

Beyond Logframe

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published an excellent booklet titled Beyond Logframe: Using Systems Concepts in Evaluation, which you can download in English from its web-site. I am particularly enthusiastic about the first article by Richard Hummelbrunner Beyond Logframe: Critique, Variations and Alternatives. Since I experienced difficulties downloading the document from the Japanese site, I summarise some main points below. If you'd like to have a copy of the full article via e-mail, please let me know - for those who have my ordinary e-mail address, use that one, for those who don't, try micraab(at)web.de and be prepared to wait for a few days.

Milestones - or millstones around your neck?

People in development agencies like milestones - not the real life objects, but those imaginary markers which indicate that a project is progressing as planned - or not. Craftspeople, engineers, cooks and other people who work with tangible objects know what milestones they need to pass on the way to the finished product. Sometimes traditional ceremonies accompany the passing of such milestones - for example, in Germany people have a ceremony when they complete the roof structure of a house.