Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 79

There are several advantages to having a TOC in place:

 Ownership The TOC provides a unique moment of stakeholder participation where all those who have a stake in the programme can meaningfully contribute to it from the design and conceptualisation stage. Increasing ownership increases commitment and collective synergies and hence the programme’s overall chances of success.

 Relevancy Planning with others and with an ear firmly to the ground is hugely helpful in ensuring that the programme meets the needs of its targets in context, and will therefore be relevant.

 Focus A TOC planning process begins with a definition of the desired change which means that everything thereof will be defined and decided per reference to this change. The desired change is the focus, and the focus determines the means.

 Value for money Programmes that do not think through the elements that a TOC often ‘forces’ a planning process to go through can have less value for money. The lack of focus on the ultimate change may lead to the implementation of multiple activities that in the end are a distraction and do not contribute to generate impact.

 Measurement A theory of change can facilitate the measurement and data collection elements of an evaluation (Connell et al. 1998). It helps evaluators ensure that they are measuring the right activities (i.e. the ones that are anticipated to result in change) and that they have developed appropriate research tools. Furthermore, articulating a theory of change at the outset and gaining agreement on it by all stakeholders reduces, but does not eliminate, the problems associated with causal attribution of impact (Connell et al. 1998).