The world is complex: it is made up of many different components which interact in messy, adaptive and unpredictable ways. Complexity poses great challenges to policy-making and evaluation because complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable.
CPD Courses
CECAN Workshop: The Pluralistic Evaluation Framework: A Workshop for People in Policy Impact Appraisal
When a problem is to be solved in a complex environment with a diversity of stakeholders, how can a policy be democratically justified as “good” use of public funds? How can we appraise policies in a more concrete way than resorting to vague general value judgements such as “enhanced” and “improved”?
CECAN Syllabus CPD Workshop: Qualitative Comparative Analysis
This session introduces qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) – a case-based approach that relies on Boolean algebra, which crudely speaking is a way of sorting differentiating units or cases according to whether they share or do not share particular configurations of attributes.
CECAN Seminar on Mixed Methods Evaluation, Using QCA and NVIVO with Wendy Olsen
We were delighted to welcome Wendy Olsen to give a CECAN seminar last week ‘Mixed Methods Evaluation, using QCA and NVIVO’.
CECAN Seminar: The Spectrum of Overwhelming Systems
In a 2014 paper in Futures we explored the relatively straightforward proposition that societal systems combine two qualities that are commonly referred to as complexity and complicatedness.
CECAN Seminar with Zenda Ofir
We were thrilled to welcome Zenda Ofir to give a CECAN seminar in February ‘How evaluation in the SDG era can mislead, and what to do about it.’
Looking Through a Glass Darkly: Public Goods and Agricultural Policy
This blogpost highlights some of the points raised in a policy brief, New Directions: A public goods approach to agricultural policy post-Brexit. Following the Brexit referendum, the mantra “public monies for public goods” has been increasingly heard, especially in relation to agricultural and environmental policy.
CECAN Syllabus CPD Workshop: Designing Evaluations for Complex Policy Interventions
The course covers the main strategies, approaches and methods that an evaluator or evaluation commissioner might want to use to tackle the challenges of complexity social science and policy evaluation.
CECAN Webinar: Evaluating Policy for Food Security – Before and After Implementation
Household food security is a classic complex system. Countries that are food secure when viewed at country-scale may nevertheless have considerable food security problems at household scale.
CECAN Seminar: Mixed Methods Evaluation, Using QCA and NVIVO
In development studies, one wants an evaluation team to face up to the challenge of combining surveys with semi-structured interview data. In this seminar I explain and show how these linkages are made with concrete data about villages in Bangladesh and India.
Humility and Courage: Strategy and Evidence in Our Complex World
Here in CECAN, a lot of time is spent considering and analysing policies, projects and interventions. We also think about methodologies, approaches and systems that we can adopt to do this analysis in the best way possible.
Dynamic Pattern Synthesis for Modeling Complex Systems. An Interview with Phil Haynes
Phil Haynes is Professor of Public Policy and researches and teaches public policy and management, as applied to a variety of contemporary circumstances. His research focuses on the application of complex systems theory, often using applied statistical methods. His research has been funded by the ESRC and the government and voluntary sector.
Finding The Common Ground
Along with several lead and co-authors, as part of a British Ecological Society Agricultural Ecology Group convened workshop held in December 2017, a report has been produced entitled “Finding the Common Ground”, which sets out an ecological perspective on how future agricultural policy should develop as a consequence, and in relation to, Brexit.
Call for Abstracts: RGS-IBG Conference 2018 on Geographical Landscapes
The concept of the Water-Energy-Food nexus has been in vogue since being identified as part of the ‘perfect storm’ of drivers on society by the UN in 2011.
Carillion May Have Collapsed, But Public-Private Partnerships Can Be So Much More…
Last month, Carillion, one of the largest companies in the UK which regularly entered into contracts with government to deliver public infrastructure and services, went into liquidation. Since then, public-private partnerships (PPP), and their pantomime villain superstars – private finance initiatives (PFI) – have received an unprecedented level of criticism. The Guardian Opinion section – and my love-hate relationship with it – has gone into overdrive!
Computational Modelling of Public Policy: Reflections on Practice
CECAN has published a new paper, ‘Computational Modelling of Public Policy: Reflections on Practice.’
CECAN Seminar: How Evaluation in the SDG Era Can Mislead, and What to do About it
Professionals in evaluation pay a lot of attention to how to evaluate. We are less thoughtful about exactly what to evaluate, and why. Stakeholders’ interests and questions tend to determine what will be useful to focus on at a particular point in time.
Teaching Evaluation of Complex Policy and Programmes
CECAN develops, tests and enhances methods to deal with complexity in policy evaluation, trying to advance research, policy and evaluation practice. To ensure that these methods will influence an ever widening audience, CECAN has now launched a syllabus for building capacity and supporting the application of complexity sensitive evaluation nationally and internationally.
Putting Values Back in Evaluation
Policy evaluation is about assessing the value of policies, but too little attention, it seems to me, is paid to the meaning of “value” in all this. The English word “value”, of course, has multiple meanings that include numerical (e.g. “a parameter value”), economic (e.g. “good value”) and ethical (e.g. “a value judgment”).
CECAN Attends Social Innovation Conference
CECAN was represented at the recent Social Innovation Conference in Lisbon, by Professor Liz Varga of Cranfield University.
BEIS Energy Trilemma
The aim of the case study was to explore, via CECAN’s approach to participatory systems mapping, the energy trilemma policy landscape. Specifically, it was to map relevant policies, their interaction, context, and impact on the trilemma, and to highlight: the impacts of policies on the three ‘legs’ of the trilemma; potential common and/or contradictory aims and mechanisms amongst policies; and uncertainty and evidence gaps.
Building Collaborative Narratives and Developing Trust in Policy and its Evaluation
On the 23rd and 24th November 2017 members of the CECAN team, Pete Barbrook-Johnson, Clare Twigger-Ross and myself attended the EEEN conference in the beautiful surroundings of the Royal Society in Edinburgh. Facilitated by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), civil servants from environment agencies, consultants, practitioners and academics came together to share experiences and ideas for the future of environmental policy evaluation.
CECAN Webinar: Complexity Theory and “Invisible Mechanisms”: Implications for Methods and Commissioning
This presentation continues the CECAN series on realist research and evaluation and their use in relation to complexity. It focuses on the issue of causation.
CECAN Seminar: Evaluation in Follow Up and Review Processes of the SDGs: Future Vision and Current Practice
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations in 2015 puts follow-up and review processes at the heart of global and national efforts to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Research Fellow – RCUK Innovation Fellowship
The University of Surrey has been awarded a three year RCUK Innovation Fellowship by ESRC.
CECAN International Symposium on Complexity Approaches to Evaluate Global Nexus Policy Challenges
This month CECAN proudly hosted an International Symposium on complexity approaches to evaluate global nexus policy challenges, at Barnett Hill Hotel in Surrey.
An Extra Claus for the Santa Book? Evaluating Christmas the CECAN Way!
As we all know CECAN is pioneering, testing and promoting innovative policy evaluation approaches and methods across Nexus domains through a series of “real-life” case study projects – it’s about measuring best value in complex, inter-connecting systems.
Travels in Evaluation – Systematising the Complex, Enjoying the Journey
I first heard of Qualitative Comparative Analysis from Prof David Byrne at an early CECAN meeting and it seemed to address key issues we faced when evaluating 13 very different interventions across England designed to improve community resilience to flooding.
CECAN’s The Visual Representation of Complex Systems at Environment, Economy, Democracy: Flourishing Together
As the first step in developing my CECAN research project titled ‘The Visual Representation of Complex Systems: A Typology of Visual Codes for Systemic Relations’ I was thrilled to have the opportunity to engage with the Relating Systems Thinking and Design community last month.
Energy Security Policy Evaluation Workshop at BEIS
We were delighted to run a successful policy evaluation workshop last week with policy teams and analysts working on energy security and the wider energy ‘trilemma’ (decarbonisation, prices, and security), at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).