[This blog post was written by Ricardo Ramirez & Dal Brodhead, Principal Investigators of the project Designing Evaluation and Communication for Impact (DECI)] In this posting we share our practical experience in capacity development in the fields of evaluation and communication.  We have been mentoring projects to produce evaluation and communication strategies together. Our partners have been research projects globally, all of which aim to influence national policies in the

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Rezarta Delibashzade, Project management/Researcher at the Democracy for Development Institute (D4D)  from Kosovo. It is part of a series of reflections from participants and facilitators of the Online training to strengthen Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning on policy influence, supported by the Think Tank Fund and the Think Tank Initiative.] I am Rezarta Delibashzade and I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend “ Online

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Andriy Andrusevych, Senior Policy Expert at the Resource & Analysis Center “Society and Environment” from Ukraine. It is part of a series of reflections from participants and facilitators of the Online training to strengthen Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning on policy influence, supported by the Think Tank Fund and the Think Tank Initiative.] This year our center, Society and Environment, introduced M&E&L into one of its projects rel

The online course on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning has been a valuable and in the same time – challenging experience. The challenging character has been provided by questioning the impact that we produce within our societies as think tanks and civil society organizations and as individuals working within those organizations. The questions have not addressed the mere existence or non-existence of such an impact, but the way we define “impact/change”, measure it, register

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Dena Lomofsky from of Southern Hemisphere. It emerges from reflection from P&I´s online course on Monitoring, evaluating and learning on policy influence, supported by the Think Tank Fund and the Think Tank Initiative.] Thinking small needs thinking big first. When designing how to monitor and evaluate it is best to start with the big picture and understand the intervention in its full complexity, and then narrow it down to fit the com

By Linda Bullock at flickr.com under CC Within current debates on what is policy influence and how to assess whether a policy research  organization has been successful in its efforts or not, there has been recently an increasing acknowledgment of the complexity of this task, and questions about how much can be really measured or is worth measuring abound. At P&I, and especially within our online course focused in MEL of policy influence through exchange with colleagues in de

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Dena Lomofsky from of Southern Hemisphere. It emerges from reflection from P&I´s online course on Monitoring, evaluating and learning on policy influence, supported by the Think Tank Fund and the Think Tank Initiative.] While conducting the on-line course for Politics & Ideas on monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL onwards) for policy influence, we facilitated a brainstorming session about what think tanks already have in place to

By Anne Adrian under CC at flickr.com [Editor’s note: This post was written by Kristie Evenson, a research practitioner on development of policy research organizational capacities, based in Croatia and working in the Europe and Eurasia region. It emerges from reflection from P&I´s current course on Monitoring, evaluating and learning on policy influence, supported by the Think Tank Fund and the Think Tank Initiative.] One of the more challenging parts of assisting to facilita

Many policy research organizations are grappling with how to assess their policy influence in a sustainable, viable and meaningful manner. Some of them have tried to develop monitoring and evaluation methods with the aid of experts and/or donors but many of them failed to really implement and use these systems for many reasons: they become too time consuming, the type of indicators are too rigid for the different programs, they end up with reports that no one uses in terms of

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Elena Polo, Research Analyst at AGENDA Institute, Albania. It  is part of a series of reflections from participants and facilitators of the Online course Re-thinking your Funding Model that took place in 2014, supported by the Think Tank Fund.] Being part of Civil Society Organizations is practically an engagement as interesting as defiant in the same time. It is a sector of a continuous development in a parallel way with the general d

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Zoryana Kozak, co-founder and Senior Policy Expert of the Resource & Analysis Centre “Society and Environment”, Ukraine. It  is part of a series of reflections from participants and facilitators of the Online training to strengthen M&E&L on policy influence in Central and Eastern Europe, supported by the Think Tank Fund.] I would like to say few words and share my experience of participation in the “Online training to strengthen Monito

By Anne Davis 773 under CC at flickr.com Editor’s note:  This post was written by Ulviyya Mikayilova, Policy Unit manager at the Center for Innovations in Education (CIE), from Azerbaijan. In 2013, a small Policy unit on Social Policy was set up at CIE with the support of the OSF Think Tank Fund. This post is part of a series of reflections from participants and facilitators of the Online training to strengthen M&E&L on policy influence in Central and Eastern Europe, supporte

By Denise Krebs under CC license In June 2014 the Think Tank Initiative (TTI) commissioned Politics&Ideas to undertake a ‘light touch review’ of capacity development (CD) within TTI Phase 1 in order to inform the TTI CD approach in Phase 2.  Their team found that –before designing the new CD strategy- it would be very valuable to step back from the program and review what they had done in Phase 1. They also were interested in scanning across the ecosystem of support to policy

Courtesy of nero vivo under CC at flickr.com This is the second post of a series focusing on how we can better incorporate the complexity paradigm as a key framework to tackle the challenges and questions shared by many of us interested in the interaction between research and policy. As I had anticipated in this first post about welcoming complexity, I have am doing some reading about complexity and I am very eager to explore how to land very useful concepts and reflections t

By kat m research at flickr.com under CC license Catherine Fisher´s post on our Lessons learned paper as well as Antonio Capillo´s points regarding M&E of capacity building activities have made me reflect more deeply on how we can better grapple the way we “measure” what we achieve through capacity building in terms of strengthening the link between research and policy. As Catherine rightly highlighted in our paper we can say very little about how the Spaces for Engagement pr

[Editor’s note: This post is part of a series devoted to tools and frameworks for researchers to plan better projects right from the start.] Researchers who seek to influence policies face the challenge to link theory and practice daily. However, thinking about our work in the traditional categories: empirical, theoretical, quantitative, qualitative, does little to help us in this endeavour. Is there a better way to categorize research projects and research questions? Could t

Monitoring and evaluating capacity building (CB) is still a challenge to many similar endeavors. There is no single response to this challenge. There are also diverse aspects to be measured. According to LaFond and Brown (2003), “monitoring and evaluation can help answer a range of questions about: the process of capacity change (how capacity building takes place), capacity as an intermediate step toward performance (what elements of capacity are needed to ensure adequate per

At Spaces for Engagement, our M&E approach was linked to the way the programme was developed: since we presented yearly plans on activities to be conducted, we mainly annually measured success by evaluating impact of each planned CB activity. However, after reading Antonio Capillo´s reflection in his previous post on this topic, I believe we could have begun every year by designing an approximate theory underpinning the expected change or impact over time, as short as this wa

[Editor’s note: This post is part of a series that brings together reflections from a year-long leadership strengthening programme that Grupo Faro (Ecuador) and ASIES (Guatemala) jointly carried out with Enrique Mendizabal and Vanesa Weyrauch as mentors.] I entered this project full of enthusiasm due to the openness of two leading organisations in their respective countries, which despite their good reputation and earned success in different levels, acknowledged that they nee

This post was written by Ravi Murugesan, INASP  Associate,  as a response to Vanesa Weyrauch’s post titled “Is online training THE thing?” in this website. I work in the AuthorAID project at INASP, an international development charity in the UK that is dedicated to putting research knowledge at the heart of development. AuthorAID’s mission is to support developing country researchers in publishing their work. Since 2007, when we started out, we have conducted numerous worksho