A theory of change sets out how a programme is supposed to work: what it does, what it expects to follow, and why. Most of my evaluation work starts there, and a lot of my writing on causal mapping grew out of dissatisfaction with how theories of change are usually drawn.
Theorymaker is my free web app for writing one as text and getting a diagram back. Various versions of it have been up since about 2012. I shut it down at the start of 2024 and rebuilt it, with AI help, at the end of 2025.
I also wrote a set of slides on theories of change in evaluation.
Two pieces in the Causal Map Garden take this further:
- Causal mapping can help reconstruct a programme theory empirically, so the theory of change comes out of the evidence rather than a workshop.
- Theories of change and causal maps in Ghana, a book chapter with James Copestake and Fiona Remnant that sets a programme’s official theory against a map coded from what people said.