Compare methods

	Social Audit	Participatory Impact Assessment
Field	Development Studies	Development Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	2014
Originator	Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), Rajasthan, India; institutionalised in India's MGNREGA	Andy Catley and colleagues, Feinstein International Center, Tufts University
Type	Public accountability and verification method	Participatory project impact assessment method
Seminal source	Centre for Good Governance (2005). Social Audit: A Toolkit - A Guide for Performance Improvement and Outcome Measurement. Hyderabad: Centre for Good Governance.	Catley, A., Burns, J., Abebe, D., & Suji, O. (2014). Participatory Impact Assessment: A Design Guide. Somerville, MA: Feinstein International Center, Tufts University.
Aliases	Social Audit, Public Social Audit, Jan Sunwai, Community Social Audit	PIA, Participatory Impact Evaluation, Community-Based Impact Assessment, Participatory Impact Measurement
Related	4	4
Summary	A Social Audit is a method of public accountability in which citizens collectively examine official records of public spending and works and verify them against physical reality, culminating in an open public hearing where discrepancies are confronted in front of officials. Forged by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan, India, in the 1990s and later embedded in law through India's national employment guarantee programme (MGNREGA), the social audit turns the right to information into a tool for exposing corruption and securing redress.	Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA) is an approach to measuring the impact of development and humanitarian projects in which the affected communities define the indicators of change and use participatory tools to quantify it. Developed and codified by Andy Catley and colleagues at Tufts University's Feinstein International Center, largely through work on livestock and livelihoods programmes in pastoralist settings, PIA adapts participatory rural appraisal methods to the disciplined logic of impact evaluation — combining locally meaningful indicators with before-and-after and with-and-without comparisons to assess what a project actually changed.