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Impact Pathways Project

Impact Pathways, Most Significant Change and the CPWF

By Boru Douthwaite, Senior Scientist, CIAT, Colombia; Sophie Alvarez, CPWF Theme 3 Leader, IWMI, Sri Lanka; Rick Davies, Independent M&E specialist, and; Simon Cook, CPWF Basin Focal Projects Leader, CIAT, Colombia 

Most people think of impact assessment as something carried out by economists several years after the end of the project.  They think it is important to show their organization is doing a good job, and perhaps for producing publications, but it rarely affects the way they think about their own work.  They certainly don’t do it themselves!

The Basin Focal Project (BFP) Impact Assessment Project is attempting to change all this.  The project has begun running workshops to help CPWF projects clarify what sorts of impacts they expect to have, and how these changes will come about.  In other words, we are helping projects define their Impact Pathways and, in doing so, workshop participants are carrying out ex ante impact assessment, in economists’ jargon. (If carried out after the end of a project, economists call it ex post impact assessment.)

In the CPWF workshops, we spend two days developing impact pathways and on the third day we introduce an approach called most significant change (MSC) [ See www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.htm ] We use MSC to monitor progress along the impact pathway.  A Knowledge Sharing in Research Pilot Project is co-funding the MSC work as the approach also fosters learning about others’ innovative experiences. 

You can download a synthesis of MSC, called Stories from the Field, coming from the CPWF projects in 2007. Details of the content of the IP workshop format and content can be found in the Volta Workshop Report.  

We define an Impact Pathway as: (i) the causal chains of activities, outputs and outcomes (a timeline, similar to a Gantt chart) that show how a project achieves its purpose and goal; and (ii) network maps that show the evolving relationships between project implementing organizations, project partners and the ultimate beneficiaries that are necessary to achieve the goal. 

Developing an Impact Pathway helps a project better understand and communicate what it is doing, whom it is doing it with, and why.  This makes the project more fundable and helps with monitoring and evaluation.  It can also help the project focus on high priority activities and relationships. Moreover, constructing impact pathways for the projects in a basin helps the respective project leaders, basin coordinator and the CPWF Secretariat better identify complementarities and synergies between projects, thus contributing to basin research program development.  

We are not the only people who use the term “impact pathway”. The Science Council of the CGIAR now asks the CPWF to report in terms of impact pathways.  The added value of our approach is the emphasis we put on networks.  As such, we aim to bring together the best of two models of how innovation occurs – the traditional one used by the Science Council that uses logic models such as logical frameworks (log frames); and a network model, to give a fuller and more realistic understanding of a project’s impact pathway.

One way that network maps help is that they show multiple linkages between partners, and thus multiple ways in which ideas and technologies can interact and be developed and diffused.  This helps people see that they are part of a network, and it is the network, not just their organization alone, that will achieve impact.  It also helps people appreciate that the interactions between actors, indicated by the links in the map, make the innovation process inherently unpredictable in the medium and long-term, thus placing more emphasis on the need for continual monitoring and evaluation to support adaptive project management.  

Participants have found it useful to draw a map of the network that will be using and disseminating their project outputs 2 years after the end of the project.  It is this network that will determine whether their project will achieve its eventual goal.  We also ask them to draw the network of organizations (actors) working together now.  If their future network does not exist in their current one, and usually it does not, then this suggests relationships that the project needs to forge before the end of the project.  This, in turn, suggests different ways of working with partners which can then be added as activities, outputs and outcomes to their (linear) timeline. 

Some of the feedback we have received from workshop participants includes: 

“I will use impact pathways in future design of projects” 
“The dynamics of the networks is useful to envision the future” 
“I will share the approach with partners and colleagues” 
“I will use the approach to develop the project further” 
“I will use the approach in other projects” 
“It helps show gaps” 
“It is good for planning” 
“It is good to check where the project is” 
“It helps explain impact of my project” 
“Constructing impact pathways should not be one-shot”. 

As the feedback indicates, there is a demand from participants to continue using the impact pathway approach in their projects, and to introduce it to partners.  Since January 2006, 11 impact pathways workshops have been run by the CPWF, for 45 projects and attended by 220 people, 100 of whom were non-CGIAR participants (NARS, NGO, ARI, etc).  Workshops have been held in eight of the 9 CPWF basins.  Workshop reports can be found here.

We share a vision of a CPWF where project managers and staff work with impact pathways because they help them plan, monitor and evaluate, communicate what their projects are doing and achieve their project and CPWF goals.  We want people to be doing their own impact assessment because it helps them do their job better! A joint CPWF discussion paper which considers the implications and practicalities of adopting an Impact Pathways perspective in our work was published in the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation.

For a copy of the discussion paper, or for more information regarding Impact Pathways, please contact Boru Douthwaite at b.douthwaite@cgiar.org

Impact Pathways training materials are incorporated in an online manual available here  http://boru.pbwiki.com/Online+manual

Read the CPWF Impact Pathways Approach (PDF 113Kb)

For the most up to date information about Impact Pathways, please visit the Impact Pathways Wiki.