What is Outcome Mapping (OM) and why is it valuable? When does it work best? How can donors facilitate its use? This note draws on case studies to review OM – a flexible, actor- and learning-centred approach to planning, monitoring, and evaluating social change initiatives. It finds that adopting OM for appropriate projects could help development agencies to increase their effectiveness and meet commitments to managing for results. OM is well-suited to areas involving complex change processes, capacity building work, and knowledge and decision-making processes. Shifting to OM’s learning-oriented mode requires donors to adopt more realistic expectations and to dispense with the idea of ‘controlling’ change processes. Crucially, OM must be underpinned by real trust between the donor, project implementers and partners.
Outcome Mapping was developed by the International Development Research Centre in Canada. It is a set of tools and guidelines that steer project or programme teams through a learning process to identify their desired change and to work collaboratively to bring it about. Results are measured by the changes in behaviour, actions and relationships of those individuals, groups or organisations with whom the initiative is working directly and seeking to influence.
Four principles underpin the Outcome Mapping framework:
- Actor-centred development and behaviour change: As people and organisations drive change processes, OM defines the problem to be tackled, project aims and indicators of success in terms of changes in behaviour of these actors. Influencing change requires engaging with these actors, their relationships and motivations.
- Continuous learning and flexibility: OM emphasises that the most effective planning, monitoring and evaluation activities are cyclical, iterative and reflexive. OM enables learning to be fed back into adaptations to the project as it proceeds.
- Participation and accountability: By involving stakeholders in the M&E process and emphasising reflection on relationships and responsibilities, OM incorporates varied perspectives and fosters two-way accountability – something that is often missing from frameworks oriented towards upward accountability.
- Non-linearity and contribution, not attribution and control: In OM, processes of change are owned collectively. They are not the result of a causal chain beginning with ‘inputs’ and controlled by donors, but they are a complex web of interactions between different actors, forces and trends. To produce sustainable changes, projects should contribute to these processes of social change, rather than seeking to control specific outcomes and to claim attribution.
The principles and assumptions of OM make it most suited to certain contexts. These are: when working in partnership or building capacity; when a deeper understanding of social factors is critical; when promoting knowledge and influencing policy; when tackling complex problems; and when embedding reflection and dialogue. Donors introducing OM need to:
- Ensure the buy-in of senior management and pay attention to timing
- Foster capacities and advocate for OM’s core principles so as to achieve the required shift in mindset
- Manage shifts in organisational culture, and enable users of the methodology to share experience and learn together
- Be aware of OM’s flexibility from the outset to ensure that it does not become a burden, but complements existing practices
- Look for opportunities to apply aspects of OM within existing constraints, such as through integration with logframes.
