Participatory impact pathways analysis: A practical method for project planning and evaluation (Workshop paper)

This paper, prepared for a workshop ‘Rethinking Impact: Understanding the Complexity of Poverty and Change’, provides a guide to carrying out Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA).

Abstract

"PIPA allows participants in a workshop to make explicit their assumptions and hypotheses about how their projects will achieve impact. These hypotheses can be used as the basis for ex-ante impact assessment, monitoring and evaluation of the project's progress along its impact pathways, and the identification of impact hypotheses required for ex-post impact assessment. A project's impact pathways are made explicit in the form of hypotheses contained within an outcome logic model, and optionally, an impact logic model. Both put greater emphasis than traditional logic models on the actors involved in making change happen and how these actors themselves are expected to change. Testing of impact hypotheses contained within the logic model(s) through regular reflection workshops, as described in this brief, is a practical action research method to understand how research outputs can be developed and used so as to achieve developmental outcomes." (Mackay, 2008)