Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 83

What makes TOC strong also makes it weak: accounting for and relating complexity will increase the challenge of pinpointing exactly what leads to what and finally what leads to what expected change. However, the emphasis on causal attribution has been downplayed over the years, and particularly in the performance evaluation of public sector initiatives in the context of a mainstreamed managing for results approach, where it is accepted that ‘the manager might be only one of several players trying, with the resources and authorities available, to influence the achievement of the intended outcomes’ (Mayne 2001: 2).

Gradually, therefore, the emphasis has been shifted to contribution or the attempt to demonstrate plausible association as opposed to bulletproof, beyond reasonable doubt attribution. This distinction between attribution and contribution is essential:

In much of the literature, attribution is used to both identify with finding the cause of an effect and with estimating quantitatively how much of the effect is due to the intervention. The term contribution is used here in the following way: in light of the multiple factors influencing a result, has the intervention made a noticeable contribution to an observed result and in what way? (Mayne 2012: 273)

The acceptance of plausible association or contribution suits theory-based evaluations (Mayne 2012) and to a large extent helps deal with the challenge of complexity and multiple contributing factors.