Event Detail

Theories of change are a set of hypotheses of how and why change happens and what social accountability’s contribution may be. Theories of change and similar forms of causal models have become increasingly popular in the last few years to inform funding decisions and monitor, research, evaluate and learn from those decisions in the social accountability field (Tsai et al. 2019; GPSA, 2020; Cartwright et al., 2020). Yet, this has not been without its implementation challenges.
One of the “original sins” is that many theories of change, including those in the social accountability sector, tend to have very little explicit theory, and hypotheses are often untestable or untested (see Aston, 2021). A related challenge is how to bring together and test the multiple assumptions about change embedded into complex funding portfolios so that they can be of practical use for decision-makers, including as they decide how to leverage social accountability programming to build forward better (see Mayne, 2015; Aston, 2020).
In this webinar, we will discuss how innovators are using mid-level theory - an evaluation method being championed by the Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL) - to address this “original sin”:
At field level, we will introduce the CEDIL-funded SALT projects’ novel approach to fill the gap in theories of change focused on the scalability of social accountability in health: developing middle- level theory. One of the key insights from this work, to date, is the potential of middle-level theories of change to support better narratives to explain what the work is – a a concern expressed by major donors such as USAID and The World Bank in relation to complex programming (see Jacobstein, 2020; Thindwa 2021).
At portfolio level, the Global Partnership for Social Accountability will discuss how SALT’s mid-level approach is complementary to the revampining of its MEL system for a portfolio of social accountability projects. This MEL system has a range of users with divergent expectations about MEL and its implemented in a broad range of countries and sectors by civil society organizations with varying MEL capacities.
At project level, we will discuss mid-level theory as applied to the evaluation of a particular project: Nobo Jatra a project implemented by World Vision in Bangladesh and funded by USAID. The project integrated interventions in several sectors, including social accountability.
The webinar will be followed up by a moderated Glocal discussion with significant audience participation.