Practicing inclusive rigour: Moving from trade-offs to bright spots?

Questions about rigour, validity and credibility are central concerns of all evaluation practice. So too should be how we pay attention to meaningful participation to enable greater equity, especially when embracing complexity and seeking to achieve systems change.

Yet many evaluators and programme implementers experience a trade-off between on the one hand practicing methodological fidelity and safeguarding narrow notions of rigour and, on the other, contextualising and adapting methods to allow space for the questions, experiences, and values of multiple stakeholders to shape evaluation as a co-owned inquiry into how change happens. But what if there was a way to practice in the spaces in between, and identify opportunities for meaningful participation and valid causal inference to become mutually reinforcing?

This event was a conversation about how we are inquiring into such bright spots through applying the inclusive rigour framework in peacebuilding evaluation.