Toward More Complexity-Responsive Evaluations: Overview and Challenges

Dealing with complexity in development evaluation requires more than a good understanding of the various complexity dimensions that characterize an intervention and its context. It requires a set of methodological approaches that can address particular aspects of complexity in the evaluation design and implementation. A key question raised in this chapter is thus: How can established evaluation approaches be adapted to take account of complexity issues while operating within the real-world conditions of data, budget, and time constraints? We start by presenting a few scenarios under which development evaluations are typically conducted and discuss some of the challenges ...