Theory of Change

What is Theory of change .

ToC (Theory of Change) has many ancestors and several concurrent developments and known case studies, however if combined with OBNs (Oriented Bayesian Networks) shows its power of visually representing and helping describe a transformational process in its capacity to generate impacts, or at least transitional pathways towards achieving them.

Building a ToC for a certain intervention requires asking questions such as:

1. “What are our goals”
2. “What is needed to reach those goals”
3. “What must we put in place to fulfil those needs”

This sequential approach does a sort of reverse engineering from impacts to outcomes to outputs to activities that can be made as open and participative as one wishes. In this sense too, using OBNs for ToC representation purposes includes advantages such as the possibility of evaluating two or more alternative pathways of transition towards the desired future scenarios. A global community has been built by ToC practitioners that can be contacted at this URL: https://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/ (opens a new link)