In my experience Theories of Change remains a mythical concept in the minds of several development practitioners at field level, first because it is perceived as a compliance driven tool forced by donors and funders and second it is usually developed by consultants or technocrats with little involvement of implementing staff.
Implementing staff usually takes on the role of understanding what is required to follow the ToC assumptions and rarely will you see the ToC in operation beyond siting in the Project Proposal document. The implementing teams rarely refers to ToC perhaps because there may be some difficulties in incorporating ToC concepts in day to day operations or it may be too complex for the field staff to engage with.
I therefore see a disconnect between the intended purpose of the ToC in guiding programming and impact and the realisation of the same in practice. Also, there is the One Size fit all approach to ToC presentation which I believe could be another challenge. On one hand we want the ToC to fit on one page, highly simplified and easy to conceptualise, almost too simplistic for the real world realities. But that is what makes it easier to digest and make sense of, which is great for policy makers and high level audiences. However, for implementers, detail matters so much but we often simply leave the ToC at that high level nice and glossy presentation and expect the implementers to work some form of magic to translate that into logical delivery of interventions according to the conceptual assumptions without the necessary detailed exploration and unpacking of the ToC. Donors do not request that, it is needed by implementors so it is often left undone and implementation of project goes on with little to no reference to the ToC.
The only time the ToC question will be revisited perhaps is when the project evaluation looks to test those assumptions assuming also that implementation was guided by those assumptions which we know is not always the case.
RE: How useful are theories of change in development programmes and projects?
In my experience Theories of Change remains a mythical concept in the minds of several development practitioners at field level, first because it is perceived as a compliance driven tool forced by donors and funders and second it is usually developed by consultants or technocrats with little involvement of implementing staff.
Implementing staff usually takes on the role of understanding what is required to follow the ToC assumptions and rarely will you see the ToC in operation beyond siting in the Project Proposal document. The implementing teams rarely refers to ToC perhaps because there may be some difficulties in incorporating ToC concepts in day to day operations or it may be too complex for the field staff to engage with.
I therefore see a disconnect between the intended purpose of the ToC in guiding programming and impact and the realisation of the same in practice. Also, there is the One Size fit all approach to ToC presentation which I believe could be another challenge. On one hand we want the ToC to fit on one page, highly simplified and easy to conceptualise, almost too simplistic for the real world realities. But that is what makes it easier to digest and make sense of, which is great for policy makers and high level audiences. However, for implementers, detail matters so much but we often simply leave the ToC at that high level nice and glossy presentation and expect the implementers to work some form of magic to translate that into logical delivery of interventions according to the conceptual assumptions without the necessary detailed exploration and unpacking of the ToC. Donors do not request that, it is needed by implementors so it is often left undone and implementation of project goes on with little to no reference to the ToC.
The only time the ToC question will be revisited perhaps is when the project evaluation looks to test those assumptions assuming also that implementation was guided by those assumptions which we know is not always the case.