Theory amidst complexity – using process tracing in ex-post evaluations

Evaluators who take a complexity-aware approach must consider tradeoffs related to theoretical parsimony, falsifiability, and measurement validity. These tradeoffs may be particularly pronounced with ex-post evaluation designs in which program theory development and monitoring frameworks are often completed before the evaluator is engaged. In this paper, we argue that theory-based evaluation (TBE) approaches can address unique ex-post evaluation challenges that complexity-aware evaluation (CAE) alone cannot, and that these two sets of approaches are complimentary. We will outline strategies that evaluators may use to conduct rigorous ex-post evaluations of democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) interventions that merge CAE’s inductive approaches with a theory testing structure. It will illustrate these strategies with two case studies of ex-post evaluation using process tracing (PT).