Theory of Change Evaluation

Theory of change evaluation is a theory-based approach that evaluates a program against an explicit map of how and why it is expected to produce its intended outcomes. Rooted in Carol Weiss's work on theory-based evaluation and the Aspen Institute's community-initiatives projects of the 1990s, it requires evaluators to articulate the full causal pathway from activities through short- and intermediate-term outcomes to a long-term goal, make the underlying assumptions explicit, and then collect evidence to test whether each link in that chain holds in practice. The theory of change serves simultaneously as a planning tool and as the framework against which the program's progress and plausibility are judged.