Welcome to the Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) Wiki!
Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) is a project planning and monitoring and evaluation approach. It is a relatively young and experimental approach that draws from program theory evaluation, social network analysis and research to understand and foster innovation. It is designed to help the people involved in a project, program or organization make explicit their theories of change, in other words how they see themselves achieving their goals and having impact.
PIPA has been developed to meet some of the multiple evaluation and management needs of complex research-for-development projects and programs. These requirements include:
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Carrying out an evaluation of likely project impacts and how they will occur (ex-ante impact assessment)
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Helping projects better understand what each other are doing, identify common interests and foster programmatic integration
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Provide a framework and design for both compliance- and learning-based monitoring and evaluation
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Provide the impact hypotheses required for impact assessment after the project has finished.
PIPA begins with a workshop which culminates in an outcomes logic model that
is the basis for ex-ante impact assessment, monitoring and evaluation, and the identification of impact hypotheses required for ex-post impact assessment. The outcomes logic model puts greater emphasis on the actors involved in making change happen, and how these actors themselves are expected to change, than traditional logic models such as those commonly used by the CGIAR System.
The impact hypothesis described in the outcomes logic model are derived from (i) both causal chain analysis provided by drawing a problem tree and (ii) network maps that show the evolving relationships between project implementing organizations, next users and end users that are necessary to achieve the goal. Together they give a a fuller and more realistic description of a project’s or program's impact pathways.
Testing of impact hypotheses contained within the outcomes logic model through regular reflection workshops constitutes action research on how to foster developmental outcomes based on the use of research outputs. Our hope is that PIPA will change researchers’ perception of M&E to something they want to do to help them do a better job, and to publish, rather than something they feel they have to do to to be accountable to donor funding their work (not that this isn't very important).
A group of us are working to develop a participatory approach for helping project staff and stakeholders make their impact pathways explicit. We are: Boru Douthwaite, Sophie Alvarez, Malcom Beveridge, Simon Cook, Diana Cordoba, Rick Davies, Pamela George, John Howell, Ronald Mackay, Katherine Tehelen and Graham Thiele.
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