Causal Chain Monitoring: Assessing the Opportunities and Challenges of a New Methodology for Evaluating Impact

From 2023-2025, several international non-governmental organizations tested a new 'causal chain monitoring' methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of US foreign assistance interventions promoting women's political participation, cross-party coalition formation, and electoral integrity. The methodology involved articulating a causal chain from anticipated program inputs to outputs, short-term effects, and long-term results, then translating the causal chains into survey questions and collecting data quarterly over two years. Thirty countries with programming in at least one of the three categories participated, with eight local experts per country including program staff and external stakeholders as respondents. The pilot was funded initially by USAID and later Notre Dame. In this session, implementers and researchers will share reflections on the novel methodology and findings after a year of data collection during a volatile time for international democracy and governance assistance. They will also propose how the evaluation methodology pilot could be redesigned using a transformative approach.
Click to fill survey.