Suchergebnisse

Starting with the Australian Evaluation Society 2024 Conference theme of 'wayfinding', the article reflects on how evaluators navigate time as well as space, with particular reference to how they incorporate qualitative approaches to 'futures thinking' into their evaluative practice. The article takes a reflexive case study approach, drawing on a simple model of evaluative practice to review the role of futures thinking in evaluation of doctoral research projects, impact investments, social assistance, and development studies as an academic field. The article focuses particularly on the role of 'backcasting', as well as deliberative processes and the causal mapping of narrative claims linking future possibilities to current thinking and activities.

Debate continues over how best international development agencies can evaluate the impact of actions intended to reduce poverty, insecurity and vulnerability in diverse and complex contexts. There are strong ethical grounds for simply asking those intended to benefit what happened to them, but it is not obvious how to do so in a way that is sufficiently free from bias in favour of confirming what is expected. This article considers scope for addressing this problem by minimizing the prior knowledge participants have of what is being evaluated. The tensions between more confirmatory and exploratory methodological approaches are reviewed in the light of experience of designing and piloting a qualitative impact assessment protocol for evaluating NGO interventions in complex rural livelihood transformations. The article concludes that resolving these tensions entails using mixed methodologies, and that the importance attached to exploratory (nested within confirmatory) approaches depends on contextual complexity, the type of evidence sought and the level of trust between stakeholders.

This paper contributes to an on-going conversation between development studies (DS) and social policy (SP) as academic fields, particularly in the UK. Drawing on Andrew Abbott's analysis of the social sciences as an evolving system of knowledge lineages (KLs) it reflects first on the status of DS, and then on its relationship with SP. Defining DS as a distinctive KL centred on critical analysis of diverse ideas and projects for advancing human wellbeing, I suggest that it has lost coherence and influence even as research into international development thrives. Indeed it is easy to envisage its gradual assimilation into other KLs, including SP. The two increasingly overlap in their analysis of the causes of relative poverty and injustice, and what can be done to address them, within countries and globally. Strengthening links between the two fields can be justified as a political project, even at the risk of some loss of plurality and plenitude across the social sciences.

Microfinance can be researched narrowly as an instrument for promoting development or more broadly as an endogenous component of development. This paper sets out a simple well-being regime model incorporating both views and uses it to review the dynamics of rural microfinance in India. Four potential drivers of change in the role of microfinance in India are reviewed: evidence-based policy, rising political aspirations, new technology and agro-climatic change. The paper argues for combining more narrowly focused microfinance impact assessment with broader research into microfinance as one component of wider well-being regimes.