Participatory Impact Assessment

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.