This has been a formative year for the Centre for Development Impact (CDI). We have spent much of the year reflecting on the major global challenges of our time (inequality, insecurity, sustainability) and what this implies for the way we evaluate impact on the poorest and most marginalised.
We have sought to move beyond narrow methodological debates to explore the ‘new frontiers’ of evaluation, including with a major international conference co-hosted with Wilton Park – thanks to the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation, CIFF and DFID.
We have produced several publications and held events around these challenges, including on: (1) Evaluating impact beyond traditional aid flows, given new international priorities, new actors and new priorities; and, (2) Evaluating impact in an unpredictable and complex world, including work on complexity and systems-thinking, process tracing, QCA and realist evaluation.
Next year, we’ll be taking this further, including research on assessing the effect of impact investment on poverty, plus several CDI Practice Papers including on aspects of participatory statistics and evaluation.
Chris Barnett, December 2015
