Outcome Trajectory Evaluation (OTE): An approach to tackle research-for-development's long-causal-chain problem

OTE is a new evaluation approach recently published in the American Journal of Evaluation,* developed to evaluate four research programs' contribution to policy-related outcomes in tropical agriculture. The approach assumes, a priori, that any outcome important enough for a program to wish to claim some responsibility, will have emerged from an outcome trajectory, understood to be a patterned and evolving set of interactions between actors, technology, knowledge and institutions that play out over time. The job of the evaluator is to describe the outcome trajectory with: 1) an annotated timeline of key events and processes that happened; and 2) a middle-range theory of how policy change happens. The description of the outcome trajectory comes from writing a story that integrates the two. The timeline, theory and the findings from the story are used to answer the evaluation question: If, how and to what extent did the Program contribute to the outcome trajectory, from which the policy-outcome-of-interest emerged? * Douthwaite, B., Proietti, C., Polar, V., & Thiele, G. (2023). Outcome Trajectory Evaluation (OTE): An approach to tackle research-for-development’s long-causal-chain problem. American Journal of Evaluation, 10982140221122771