This series of webinars was first presented at the Causal Pathways Symposium 2023, which focused on "connecting, learning, and building a shared understanding of the evaluation and participatory practices that make causal pathways more visible"
Marina Apgar
Marina Apgar is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and the co-director of the Centre for Development Impact. She has led evaluation research for over 15 years in a number of large participatory research programmes, including recently the CLARISSA systemic action research programme on the worst forms of child labour and the Vestibule de la Paix peacebuilding programme. She is a human ecologist and interdisciplinary researcher, with expertise in complexity theory and action research methodologies. She has edited volumes on participatory monitoring and evaluation, convenes professional development courses on Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation for Learning, Contribution Analysis for Impact Evaluation and Assessing the Strength of Evidence for IDS and the UK Evaluation Society. She leads the Causal Pathways’ work on participation, rigour and quality and is a member of the Inclusive Rigour Co-Lab. She accompanies organisations working on social equity as they build, test and use meaningful monitoring and evaluation systems.
Contributed by this member
Resource
- This session of the Causal Pathways Symposium 2023, by Marina Apgar, Leslie Wingender, and Helene Bradburn, introduces the inclusive rigour framework.
- This session of the Causal Pathways Symposium 2023 explores when to use different methods and how to combine them to better understand and visualise causal pathways.
- This CDI Practice Paper, by Tom Aston and Marina Apgar, makes the case for ‘bricolage’ in complexity-aware and qualitative evaluation methods.
- This Research and Evidence Paper presents the theory-based and participatory evaluation design of the Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) programme.
- This article from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) is the second in a series discussing the use of contribution analysis (CA) for impact evaluation.
- This article from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) discusses the Centre for Development Impact's five-year journey in innovating and understanding contribution analysis as a primary method for impact evaluation.
- This briefing note shares guidance on using contribution analysis for adaptative management by examining how the approach enables programmes to work with theories of change in a practical, reflexive way and how its findings can inform progr
- This paper explores how contribution analysis can be used to give a quantitative sense of a contribution's importance.
Approach
- Contribution analysis is an evaluation approach that provides a systematic way of understanding an intervention's contribution to observed outcomes or impacts.