This book makes available for practice the most important lessons from the evaluation of eight ‘lobbying and advocacy’ programs carried out over the past five years by alliances of civil society organisations working in international development. The e-book offers insights and practical guidelines for donors, advocates and evaluators.
Some valuable conclusions from the book:
- “Working actively with ToCs, or comparable tools, encourages reflectiveness, acknowledging that the ultimate goal may be reached through multiple pathways, that new pathways may emerge and that strategies must remain flexible. The potential of ToC as tool for collective reflection, learning and adaptation is enormous.”
- “However, few of the evaluated alliances used ToCs effectively for communication, organisation, analysis, action, reflection or adjustment based on experience. Several of the alliances did use ToCs as a reference for discussing change.”
- “A key lesson learned from the evaluation is that advocacy programmes could in many cases be strengthened by a more active use of ToCs or related tools enabling continuous reflection and adaptation of strategy in light of changing circumstances.”
- “We found that the tool of Theory of Change can be highly useful for shared development, reflection and adjustment of advocacy programmes. There were many instances where we found that alliances could have made better use of this potential, and most alliances did not systematically reflect on and adjust Theories of Change during their programmes. In addition, we advance Theory of Change here as an important basis for addressing a broad range of evaluation questions.”