Evaluation approaches

An approach is not a method. Methods answer how you will gather and analyse evidence; approaches answer who the evaluation serves, who participates in making it, and what counts as success for the exercise itself. The same difference-in-differences analysis can sit inside a utilization-focused evaluation designed around a named decision-maker, or inside a participatory process in which the affected community sets the questions.

The choice matters most when an evaluation is likely to be ignored. A great deal of evaluation goes unread, and the approaches here are largely responses to that fact — different theories about why findings fail to get used, and different remedies. Some are contested on rigour, and where they are, these pages say so and cite the disagreement rather than smoothing it over.