Building plausible ex ante impact pathways of research for development interventions

The wealth of learning from the ex post case studies led CIRAD to question the way research for development actions are planned. In order to equip CIRAD researchers and their partners to better plan and strategize their interventions, the ImpresS methodological group developed a systematic approach to build participatory ex ante impact pathways during the design of research for development interventions.

This process started in 2017 with an iterative process involving different stages, partners and sources of information:

  • Literature from action-research in partnerships (Faure et al., 2010), participatory impact evaluation (Douthwaite et al., 2007), outcome mapping (Earl et al., 2001), theory of change (Alvarez et al., 2014; Mayne, 2015), and stakeholder power analysis (Mayers, 2005; Schiffer and Waale, 2008);
  • A three day workshop in June 2017 and eight workshops (in France, Senegal, Costa Rica, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Tunisia and Peru) during 2017, involving 12 different projects of different scope, scale and subject, and more than 100 researchers and a number of partner institutions. During the workshops, the ImpresS ex ante approach has been tested, improved and validated;
  • The publication of a manual for the application of the ImpresS ex ante approach in February 2018 (first version), a phase of experimentation of the first verison through mutiple trainings and workshops from 2018 to 2020, and then a second version in 2020 (in French, in Spanish and in English)