PIPA – Participatory Impact
Pathways Analysis

Boru Douthwaite. Online information, last updated in March 2008.
http://boru.pbwiki.com
E-mails: b.douthwaite@cgiar.org ;
b.s.alvarez@cgiar.org

Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) is a project planning, monitoring and evaluation approach. It is a relatively young and experimental approach that draws from programme theory evaluation, as well as from social network analysis and research, to understand and foster innovation. It is designed to help the people involved in a project, programme or organisation make explicit their theories of change - in other words, how they see themselves achieving their goals and having impact. PIPA developed from work at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) on innovation histories, and was first used in a workshop in January 2006 in Ghana, with seven projects funded by the Challenge Program on Water and Food. The information on this website is also available in Spanish.

PIPA centres on a three-day workshop, which is attended by project implementers, next users, end users and politically-important actors (where next users are the people and organisations who will use what the project will produce, and end users are the people the next users serve). The workshop starts by drawing a problem tree, and then deriving project outputs. A third step is to create a common vision among all participants, which leads to drawing network maps. A next step is to develop an outcomes logic model, and then to develop a monitoring and evaluation plan. The workshop process is designed to help participants surface, discuss and describe their hypotheses for how project activities and outputs could eventually contribute to desired goals such as poverty reduction. The description of these hypotheses is a description of the project’s“impact pathways”, presented as either (i) causal chains of activities, outputs and outcomes through which a project is expected to achieve its purpose and goal; or (ii) network maps showing how the actors involved work together, influence each other and influence the general environment for the new knowledge or technology being developed. The workshop process develops the two perspectives in turn and then integrates them through the construction of an outcomes logic model.

The outputs developed during and after a PIPA workshop can be used for ex-ante impact assessment, monitoring and evaluation, laying the foundation for ex-post impact assessment, and also to produce programme level network maps. Because of many non-tangible results (such as the identification of synergies between participants, group formation and organisation), carrying out a PIPA workshop is considered to be worthwhile even if there is no follow-up to develop an impact narrative or evaluation plan.