Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis

Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis 1 (PIPA) allows participants in a workshop to make explicit their assumptions and hypotheses about how their projects will achieve impact. These hypotheses can be used as the basis for ex-ante impact assessment, monitoring and evaluation of the project"s progress along its impact pathways, and the identification of impact hypotheses required for ex-post impact assessment. A project"s impact pathways are made explicit in the form of hypotheses contained within an outcome logic model, and optionally, an impact logic model. Both put greater emphasis than traditional logic models on the actors involved in making change happen and how these actors themselves are expected to change. Testing of impact hypotheses contained within the logic model(s) through regular reflection workshops, as described in this brief, is a practical action research method to understand how research outputs can be developed and used so as to achieve developmental outcomes. The process outcomes of the PIPA workshops have included building participants" capacity to carry out versions of PIPA themselves and helping projects in a program better understand what each other are doing.