We were delighted to have Stuart Astill and Simon Henderson host a CECAN webinar on 16th October on ‘Handling subjective views and bringing rigour to contribution analysis: Bayesian Belief Networks and evaluating likelihoods in action’.
past event
CECAN Syllabus CPD Workshop: Evaluation Fundamentals – Choosing Appropriate Methods and Assessing Overall Quality of Evaluations
This course introduces participants to the fundamental aspects of the evaluation processes that precede and follow data collection, analysis, and report drafting; and that are relevant when drafting Invitations to Tender (ITT) or Terms of Reference (ToR), when evaluating proposals, and assessing the quality of intermediate and final evaluation products / reports.
CECAN Webinar: Developing Microsimulation Models to Generate Evidence to Support Policy Change in Public Health
Over the last decade the UK Health Forum has been developing microsimulation models to estimate the future impact of public health policies targeting both behavioural (e.g. obesity, smoking) and environmental risk factors (e.g. air pollution) on the disease and economic burden to the health system and wider society.
New Transition Funding for The Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN)
ESRC has awarded transition funding to CECAN and eight other ESRC research centres to continue their pioneering social science research and to increase the use of their research in policy and practice.
CECAN Webinar: Handling Subjective Views and Bringing Rigour to Contribution Analysis: Bayesian Belief Networks and Evaluating Likelihoods in Action
Simon Henderson and Stuart Astill will give a talk showing how influence maps analysed using Bayesian Belief Networks can be used to add rigour to contribution analysis (and other evaluative judgements) in situations where subjective views rather than objective outcome data is the main source of knowledge.
Post-Brexit Policy: What’s the Deal?
CECAN researchers Dr Pete Barbrook-Johnson, Dr Amy Proctor and Dr Adam Hejnowicz presented at the British Science Festival in Hull on 12th September 2018.
The Nexus: A New Approach to Sustainability Transformations – What, Why and How
This blog reports on recent presentations and discussions held at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference in Cardiff, at a special session on adaptive management and governance of the food-energy-water-environment nexus. The session was jointly organised by researchers from CECAN and the James Hutton Institute.
CECAN Fellowship Blog: Evaluative Methodologies for the Transition Towards an Institutional Ecosystem Approach ‘System-Cultures’ Within Natural Resources Wales and CECAN
Many public natural resource management organisations are trying to institutionalise integrated approaches to natural resource management. These new approaches hold the promise of allowing them to better meet the complex institutional, policy, and natural environments in which they operate.
CECAN Webinar: Making Policy and Making Policy Work with Developmental Evaluation
CECAN were pleased to host a webinar with Dr Martin Reynolds from the Open University on 24th July.
Policy Evaluation for a Complex World
On 11th July nearly 200 delegates attended CECAN’s annual conference in the elegant and central London venue of One Birdcage Walk.
CECAN Seminar: Applying Process Tracing Within a Realist Evaluation
This seminar, led by Adam Stiles, will examine the application of process tracing methods within a realist evaluation. The evaluation of the ‘Transitional Arrangements (TA) for Demand Side Response’ scheme was commissioned by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and has been led by CAG Consultants in partnership with Charles Michaelis (CECAN).
FSA – Regulating Our Future
Contact: Martha Bicket The Food Standards Agency and ‘Regulating Our Future’. The objectives of this case study were to support the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to define a Theory of Change (TOC) for Regulating our Future (ROF) and the know-how to update and use the...
BEIS Energy Innovation Programme
On 25th April 2018, BEIS and CECAN held a workshop bringing together members of the CECAN team with analysis and policy leads in BEIS, responsible for this £505 million programme. The workshop explored options for the development of an evaluation strategy for the programme; it is the first activity in the ongoing support CECAN will offer in this key policy area. The programme is made of many projects with diverse aims and contexts, and has key objectives around energy innovation, meaning there are many evaluation challenges.
BEIS and the Renewable Heat Incentive: Understanding Complex Applications
The aim of the case study was to apply Participatory Systems Mapping to support the current evaluation, and specifically to understand the causal and stakeholder relationships underpinning applications to the RHI to install biomethane and biogas plants, and their outcomes. BEIS and CAG Consultants, the evaluation contractors, believed that the approach would be particularly useful in this context as biomethane and biogas plants typically operate within a wide network of actors, stakeholders and beneficiaries.
Evaluating the Energy Innovation Programme: CECAN Supporting BEIS Strategy
On April 25, BEIS and CECAN held a workshop bringing together members of the CECAN team with analysis and policy leads in BEIS, responsible for the £505million Energy Innovation Programme (EIP).
Workshop on Case Based Modelling
Brian Castellani, CECAN Fellow, recently ran a workshop at Warwick University along with Pete Barbrook-Johnson. They met with Tim Sunderland of Natural England and what Brian describes as a group of great people from DEFRA and Natural England!
A Pluralistic Evaluation Framework
I wrote at the start of this year about my work on articulating values in evaluation. This has crystallised into a pluralistic evaluation framework, which I will shortly be presenting to policymakers from Defra and other agencies (in London on 12 June and in York on 3 July). This workshop is intended to offer fresh ideas and a simple template to assist at all stages of the policy cycle – from appraisal and impact assessment through to full evaluation.
The Visual Representation of Complexity
CECAN Fellow Joanna Boehnert has recently published a poster associated with her funded fellowship project entitled, “The Visual Representation of Complexity.”
CECAN Hosts Systems Mapping Workshop at BEIS
CECAN recently ran a systems mapping workshop at BEIS with a range of stakeholders from industry and government, looking at biogas and biomethane production and usage, as part of our case study on the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).
Summary Report – CECAN International Symposium on Complexity Approaches to Evaluate Global Nexus Policy Challenges
On the 9th and 10th November 2017 CECAN proudly hosted a two-day International Symposium at Barnett Hill in Surrey, UK.
CECAN Syllabus for Evaluation of Complex Policies and Programmes Goes Live!
Late last year, a new CECAN syllabus was put together, as a training module for policy analysts and evaluators.The syllabus outlines 10, two hour sessions, which can be incorporated into a broader post graduate programme.
CECAN Webinar: Making Policy and Making Policy Work with Developmental Evaluation
Developmental evaluation endeavours to reconfigure evaluation practice away from merely serving purposes of external accountability of policy towards making evaluation integral to the dualistic practice of policy making and policy implementation.
New E-book Available on Dynamic Pattern Synthesis
A new e-book on DPS, written by Phil Haynes of University of Brighton, has been published and is downloadable.
The Defiance of Global Commitment
The following interview was between Phil Haynes (Professor of Public Policy, Brighton University) and Brian Castellani (Professor of Sociology, Kent State University) regarding Professor Castellani’s latest book, The Defiance of Global Commitment: A Complex Social Psychology, which is part of the series he edits, complexity in social science at Routledge.
CECAN Annual Conference: Policy Evaluation for a Complex World
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.
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.’