Theory of Change (ToC) is an approach that tries to capture the complexity of societal change in a given context. Based on a thorough analysis if this context and the different parties that (could) influence the desired change - both positively and negatively - the Theory of Change can help an organisation to identify its own role and contribution to a higher and shared goal. As an organisation, you will be able to see the Pathway of Change: the things you can do to contribute positively to change, their relative importance and the order in which to do them. It will help you decide on what type of interventions you can do or shouldn't do. And it will help you to surface the assumptions that you as an organisation and as individuals implicitly made about the environment you work in, the change that you seek and the ways that you do it.
For some organisations, Theory of Change is an exercise that helps them to develop their strategic framework. This framework allows them to elaborate their interventions into concrete projects using logical framework methods. Others use ToC to design and manage the projects, replacing logframe approaches by ToC. In other cases, ToC is used retrospectively during evaluations of the impact of interventions, when baseline data of indicators is not available for instance.
In this series we'll have a closer look at the Theory of Change: what is it, what is its place in your organisation's strategic and operational decision making and does it really replace logical framework approaches?
As is often the case in international aid or non-profit management, there are many interpretations of what Theory of Change actually is.
For starters, we all have theories of change: ideas on how political, cultural, economic, religious, societal, local, small or big changes occur. We also have our ideas about what should be done to change things for the better. We have these ideas as private persons, but they also go around within organisations – on work related matters and others. But in organisations many of these ideas are implicit. There is a kind of consensus about them, but often they are not explicitly brought to the foreground, discussed or put to the test.
When we talk about Theory of Change as an instrument for international assistance or societal change, some will define it as something you do on a strategic level of an organisation. Others take a more practical point of view and see it as a project management approach that replaces logical framework methods. Some even define it as a synonym for the first column of the logical framework – i.e. the project logic column.
There are also different opinions on when you develop a Theory of Change. Is it a continuous process? Or do you do it once to prepare for a programme or to help you with your strategic reflection? Some organisations use ToC on the level of an individual project or on the level of their entire organisation. But there are also Theories of Change that rise above the project/organisational level and that describe how a particular sector, context or (worldwide) challenge should be addressed.
For some ToC is not something you do at a given time, but a way of thinking. It is like having goggles on that allow you to see things continuously in a certain perspective. For others, it is an ongoing process of action-learning. And still others see it as a product, a result of a reflection process.
For most people and organisations however, Theory of Change is that thing where you make an ‘artwork’: a drawing or schematic with cards and arrows that shows how the intervention or strategy will work. This drawing may be clear as day to its architects, but people who were not involved may sometimes get dazed and confused trying to make sense of all the symbols and arrows.
But at its best the Theory of Change is a process of interaction and discovery that helps you see beyond your familiar frames and habits and understand the full complexity of the challenge in front of you. It can help you imagine new solutions in dialogue with other people and organisations through a process of open inquiry and dialogue.
The Theory of Change (ToC) has everything to do with… change. You know that change is needed in a particular setting or context. So what do you – and others – have to do to achieve this change? That is in essence what ToC is all about: it helps you identify the desired change and gives you a clear(er) insight in the various conditions that must be in place so that your activities will achieve (or contribute to) the change that you seek.
Theory of Change sees this change as something complex and dynamic, with many contributing, influencing or even opposing factors. A consequence of this is that change more often than not isn’t in the hands of a single organisation. However in practice the scope of many ToCs is limited to the organisation that formulates it (but more on that later).
The starting point of the creation of a ToC is the description and analysis of the change that you expect to happen. This change is the goal (or goals) that you want to achieve. Then you work back to identify the conditions that must be in place to achieve the goal(s). These conditions are referred to as outcomes.
These outcomes don’t stand on their own, but are related to each other. Some outcomes influence others or are influenced by others – positively or negatively. Some are a cause of another outcome. Some must happen before others can be realised. Identifying these relations and creating the right image of how the outcomes interact and are ordered (over time) is very important to get a good understanding of what it will take to achieve change.
A major part of formulating a good ToC is to identify and test your assumptions about the outcomes and their relations. Not only do you have to identify the relations between outcomes, but you also have to explain why you think the realisation of an outcome will support the achievement of others and lead to the desired change. How can you be sure that all outcomes have been identified? And what assumptions do you make about contextual factors?
This schematic overview of conditions/outcomes and their interactions is not static but may change over time, which is why it is important to revisit and update the ToC from time to time. Once you have a good initial idea of the outcomes and their relations – also called the Outcomes Framework – you can identify for each outcome what kind of activity, process or intervention is necessary.
As we’ve explained before, Theories of Change can be formulated at different levels:
At what level you formulate your theories of change is entirely a matter of choice. For some organisations, ToC is used strictly for programme or project management and in that role it has replaced logical framework approaches. Other organisations use ToC strictly for strategic management or to analyse and describe the situation of their target group(s) and the change they desire (worldview ToC). You could use ToC of all levels in your organisation, but you are by no means required to do so. Even in programme management you can use ToC for certain programmes and outcome mapping or logical framework approaches for others.
Again not every Theory of Change needs to focus on all these possible purposes, but this overview does show that ToC can do more than help with strategic or operational management. However there is also a danger here: if you have too many purposes for your ToC then it may become too complicated, too detailed, too hard to understand and too difficult to put into practice. So it’s important to make choices and to clarify the purpose of your ToC (and develop other ToCs that may be similar but have a different emphasis).
There are many manuals about how to develop a Theory of Change. Here we will follow the 6 steps that Intrac identified based on an analysis of a good number of ToC instruction manuals.
However it is important to note that you are not obliged to do the process in this order. Below we start the process completely from scratch. But often organisations already have many things in place and they start formulating their Theory of Change later on. This is okay, one main principle of ToC is to make the implicit explicit. In fact, evaluators will sometimes stimulate you to formulate the ToC of a programme right at its end, to make the reason (logic) and assumptions behind the intervention visible in order to be able to test the assumptions and the pathway of change.
There are many ways to bake a pie and there are many ways to achieve change in a particular context. This is not so much a matter of the right way and the wrong way. Instead it is about identifying the possible strategies to achieve the change that we seek and – importantly – to make our own choices in this matter explicit. This means that you need to develop a thorough understanding of the situation and how different parties interact.
Improving your understanding on how change happens can come from discussions within your organisation (making implicit knowledge visible) and with others, from documentation and public sources, from research, from participatory analysis with stakeholders/beneficiaries (workshops, interviews, surveys…) and other approaches.
With the information about the different stakeholders, forces and influences you can create a System Map. This kind of mapping not only allows you to identify who does what, but also to understand how the different forces interact within the context.
The system map will help you to identify the organisations or actors that also work on the outcomes that you want to realise. In many cases your organisation on its own will not be able to achieve all necessary outcomes and achieve the durable change of the long-term goal(s). So what can your organisation do, given its strategic focus, expertise, resources, etc. and what can others do? What kind of working relationships (partnerships) could we establish with certain parties so we can focus on what we do best and together reach the desired outcomes and change?
Partnership or collaboration are the most direct and active ways to work with others, but not all relationships will necessarily have this level of involvement. In many cases it is more a matter of aligning your interventions with those of other actors.
Once it’s clear how change could happen within a certain context – the Theory of Change – it’s time to identify what you as an organisation are going to do to support that change: the Theory of Action.
Some manuals describe the following steps as something you do with your own team. However if you really want a solid ToC it’s much better to see this as a participatory exercise. Seek the involvement of different partners and stakeholders (including potential beneficiaries). Find a good facilitator, organise one or more workshops and allow for discussion (rather than sending documents around by email).
The first step in developing the pathway to change is to identify the change that you want to achieve. This is your long-term goal. It is a vision of success that you create together with your staff and other stakeholders. But this vision is not just a beautiful dream: it has to be firmly grounded in reality. It has to describe real people, real situations, real cultures, real organisations, etc. It has to be plausible, not some kind of utopia.
You can have more than one long term goal, but if you have more than one goal you will quickly end up with a very large number of outcomes that all have their relations and assumptions and you will end up with a big giant ToC that no-one understands (so KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid).
To clarify this vision or long term goal, you can describe what the desired change in behaviours, attitudes, capabilities, values and/or relationships will be.
Because the situation in which you work changes over time, your vision also has to by dynamic. This means that working together with other key actors you will need to solve new problems that occur and modify your approach were necessary.
The next step is to identify the key changes that are needed to achieve this goal. This is sometimes called mapping. The key changes are the conditions (or outcomes) that must be in place for the change to occur. Explain for each condition/outcome why it is necessary to achieve the goal(s).
These outcomes are not separated building blocks: they can have all sorts of relationships between them, which you must identify. For one thing, it will take more or less time to achieve certain outcomes. That is why the technique of backwards mapping is often used: starting from the final goal(s) you can identify the long term outcomes, then the intermediate outcomes and finally the early term outcomes.
Make sure that you identify the changes that must take place to achieve the long term goal(s). Don’t lose yourself in a wish-list of ‘nice-to-have’ changes but focus on outcomes that are essential for long-term success and on the main topic. Resist the temptation to include all kinds of related topics and to try and solve any kind of problem that you encounter in a given setting or context.
Through this process you will get an overview (or chart) with the outcomes and their connections, which is called the Pathway of Change (or Conceptual Pathway). You will probably start with a first draft that you’ll refine gradually, so this is kind of a gradual process. And even later on when you’re already executing your vision you will need to update the pathway of change.
Once you have this overview, it’s also important to think about who can do what. More often than not your organisation will not be able to achieve all the outcomes on its own. So who can contribute to these outcomes? And how can we collaborate with others to achieve the final goal(s)?
Once all the outcomes and their relations have been identified, you can reflect on what activities, approaches or interventions are needed to achieve each outcome. At this stage it is more about the type of activity or intervention; there is no need to go into detailed planning of interventions yet.
However it is important to get to clearly defined outcomes at this stage:
This process will give you a first version of a diagram or map with the outcomes, activities and their relations. As explained before you’ll have to go through several cycles of refinement, revision and adaptation with different stakeholders to get to a final version.
In the ToC example above, the contribution of the organisation to the overall change process is marked with the thick black arrows. In the middle, the main intervention strategies are in the boxes with the thick edges: 'Continuous training of medical staff' and 'Continuous management' training respectively. The main assumption here is 'Good political management' which will have to reduce political meddling in nominations of doctors and other medical staff and create a real motivation to work on infrastructure, fight corruption and so on. This assumption must be elaborated and clarified in the next step.
The main purpose of this diagram is that it provides a good and understandable overview of your Theory of Change. You can use all kinds of visual aids (colours, pictograms, arrows…) to accomplish this. And yes, in some cases your ToC will resemble a certain figure and you can emphasise this and release your inner creative person. But don’t force it, don’t make the message secondary to the artwork and don’t simplify too much or modify the content to fit into your beautiful artwork.
In your narrative document, it’s important to explain the rationale of your ToC: why are the different outcomes needed to achieve the overall goal and why will the different interventions lead to the achievement of the outcomes and final goal(s)?
Assumptions are rules of thumb that influence our choices. We use these rules of thumb both as individuals and as organisations. When we create our mental picture of how change is going to happen, we make a number of assumptions about the situation (context) and how people and organisations are going to act and behave. These are called contextual factors. But we also make assumptions about the Pathway of Change that we are designing:
We have to make the assumptions explicit, so that they can be debated, enriched and checked (by us before we start to do things or by evaluators in the course of an intervention or thereafter.
So listing the assumptions is not enough: it is important to test them – not just at the design phase but throughout the lifetime of the Theory of Change. This is why the identification of the assumptions is important, because then we can verify if they hold true. If they don’t, we will need to update our ToC and adapt or increase our interventions.
Together, the conceptual pathway / Theory of Action and the assumptions make sure that the ToC can be tested and validated or disproved (partially or as a whole). Evaluators can verify to what degree the outcomes are achieved, whether the assumptions hold true and whether the theory as a whole leads to the achievement (or contributes to) of the end goal.
The result of this (initial) process is:
Knowing if change actually takes place – and taking action by modifying your intervention(s) where necessary – is an important part of ToC thinking. Together with regular testing of assumptions this is also what makes ToC more of a process than just a product in terms of a diagram and a narrative document.
The focus of monitoring is not so much on the intervention itself, but on seeing whether the desired change as described by the outcomes really takes place. If you have a ToC that has identified outcomes on the short, the intermediate and the long term, you can identify indicators on these different levels. As the scope of this change is often larger than the organisation’s outreach (the organisation contributes to change; it cannot entirely be attributed to what the organisation did), monitoring is not so much about the follow-up of activities or measuring outputs. Instead this is more impact monitoring or impact assessment, that often involves information from different actors and sources outside the organisation. That doesn’t necessarily mean that information gathering has to be complex and depend on large scale surveys.
Because your organisation generally only has a specific contribution in the achievement of certain outcomes and the realisation of the final goal, certain things will be under your control and others won’t be. This means that it makes sense to focus your monitoring efforts on the effects that are more or less under your control. Sometimes this is indicated in the ToC chart with a line that indicates the accountability ceiling, or with different areas that indicate your sphere of control, your sphere of influence and your sphere of interest. Of course this doesn’t mean that you are not interested in information about outcomes or context factors that lie outside your control/influence.
The monitoring of change goes hand in hand with the examination of the assumptions. Do they still hold true or not? Does change at one level of the pathway of change indeed support change on a higher level? If this is not the case then the assumption may be false.
The reason for this regular monitoring and evaluation is not to produce reports – for donors or for management – but to re-examine the strategy and programmes from time to time. During this reflection, the following questions can help you along (Intrac, 2017):
The organisation must use the lessons from this reflection to act and to adapt the intervention(s), assumptions, strategy and so on.
So what’s the deal between Theory of Change and the logical framework approaches? Does ToC replace the logical framework?
For some organisations it does: they use ToC to manage their projects and programmes instead of the logical framework. They use the diagram instead of the project logic column because the find the linear cause-and-effect structure too limiting. They combine it with a PME system that use indicators and they follow up the assumptions.
One reason for replacing the logframe with ToC is to be liberated of the straight jacket of donor procedures. Because the logframe has become an obligatory part of the contract with the donor, it has lost its flexibility. Using the logframe is not something that these organisations do to manage their projects and impact, but to manage their donor funding (which is not the same). It has become an obligatory number, a box-ticking exercise.
But originally the logframe was intended to be flexible. In every step of its development (LFA, PCM and RBM) more emphasis was put on true flexibility, true participation, true learning through M&E etc. But these were always very much restrained because of strict funding legislation and administrative procedures (red tape). So there is a fear that Theory of Change in time will also fall victim to such an evolution and that it will become a ‘Logframe on steroids’ – just another box-ticking exercise.
The real potential and advantage that Theory of Change promises comes about when it is used on a strategic level, in combination with logical framework approaches to manage the interventions. This offers the best of two worlds. At the one hand, Theory of Change allows an organisation to see beyond its usual scope (specialisation, available resources, geographical location). It rightly sees change in a society as something that cannot realistically be achieved by a single actor – however well-funded it may be. It lays bare the complexity and many dimensions of change at this level. It clarifies the overall story of this change; the big steps that have to be taken.
Logframe approaches on the other hand remain very useful to take these big ideas (outcomes) and break them down in practical steps, intermediate outputs and everything practical that is needed to manage a project. They help you formulate a project in a participatory manner and organise the daily management of an intervention. That is, if you use them to really manage the project and not just to appease your donor.
So rather than replace the logical framework approaches, the Theory of Change can complement them and enrich your strategic thinking. The real advantage to this combination of ToC and logframes is that the ToC allows you to look beyond the scope of your own organisation and your own interventions. It broadens your view and allows you to show how your interventions contribute to a larger change movement, rather than pretending you’re doing everything on your own. However, this is precisely what many ToCs do, making them unrealistic and not really believable.
Both Theory of Change and Logical Framework methods are valuable instruments. ToC is able to provide a deep understanding of the context(s) you are working in, how change can be achieved in a complex setting and what the role (contribution) of your organisation can be. Once you’ve identified the big outcomes your organisation can work on, you can identify intervention strategies and use the logical framework to design the specifics of each particular intervention and how you are going to execute and manage it.
This combination of Theory of Change and logical framework combines the best of both worlds, but it is not the only possible way. Many organisations use ToC to manage their projects rather than using a logframe approach. However there is a danger here that such a ToC will focus entirely on what the organisation will do (as it describes its intervention) and loose the broader perspective. Or that the organisation will claim that it will deal with all the needs of the target group(s) while in reality it doesn’t have the capacity to do so.
Something that is less present in many manuals is how to formulate the ToC in a participatory way, involving (potential) beneficiaries and other stakeholders. There is a danger that ToC becomes a top-down exercise, created by a small group of specialised staff. While this can be your starting point, it is important to get the input and feed-back of others on your theory. This will allow you to refine it in the beginning and review it later on, so you can create that beautiful piece of art that explains it all. Just make sure that the artwork doesn’t become more important than the content!
Theory of Change helps us to make our implicit assumptions explicit and pushes us to reflect on how we will deal with these assumptions, to deal with them and to monitor them over time. This helps us to understand the ‘boundary conditions’ of our interventions and what we can/must do when these conditions change over time. But the assumptions also provide us a valuable entry point for evaluation. By making them explicit they can be tested during an evaluation, which provides us an opportunity for organisational learning and improvement of our strategy and our interventions over time. This is what makes Theory of Change dynamic rather than a fixed product.