Table of Contents
Welcome to Evaluation and Value for Investment! Here's a thematic directory of posts
This is Evaluation and Value for Investment, a series about disrupting ‘value for money’ assessment to strengthen its validity, credibility and use in a wider range of contexts and to make it more inclusive and value-focused. My aim is to provide content that’s useful, interesting, and fun.
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Here’s a thematic summary of the main topics I’ve covered to date:
1. The Value for Investment approach
I developed the Value for Investment (VfI) approach through doctoral research, to bring greater clarity to answering evaluative questions about how well resources are used, whether enough value is created, and how more value may be created from the resources invested in policies and programs. VfI is my contribution to better value-for-money assessment.
Practical VfI guidance documents:
Practical tips on using the VfI approach:
The ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of VfI:
Power dynamics and VfI:
VfI news:
2. Rubrics and evaluative reasoning
Rubrics and evaluative reasoning are the bedrock of the VfI system. A rubric is a matrix of criteria (aspects of value) and standards (levels of value) that evaluators use as a scaffold to make sense of evidence and render a warranted value judgement. In other words, a rubric is a way of making evaluative reasoning explicit.
Posts about rubrics and evaluative reasoning:
3. Program theory and value propositions
VfM assessments are too often unclear about the value and distracted by the money. We can address this by re-framing policies and programs as investments in value propositions. That’s why I prefer the term Value for Investment. Value propositions are useful constructs because we can define them and evaluate how well they’re met.
Posts about program theory and value propositions:
4. Economic methods of evaluation
VfI is an inter-disciplinary approach, because “good resource use” is a shared domain of evaluation (determining the goodness of things) and economics (studying how people choose to use resources). The VfI approach encourages the inclusion of economic methods of evaluation within a wider mixed methods framework, where feasible and appropriate.
Posts about cost-benefit analysis:
Posts about other economic methods of evaluation:
5. Cubist Evaluation
Cubist Evaluation seeks to challenge and disrupt conceptions of rigorous evaluation in complexity by encouraging us to think beyond methods, beyond measurement, and beyond objectivity. It involves mixing methods and reasoning strategies, honouring multiple perspectives, challenging dominant narratives, contributing new meaning, and opening up possibilities. It highlights a set of dispositions that we can choose to bring to evaluation and Value for Investment.