Theory amidst complexity – using process tracing in ex‐post evaluations

Evaluators who take a complexity‐aware approach must consider tradeoffs related to theoretical parsimony, falsifiability, and measurement validity. These tradeoffs may be particularly pronounced with ex‐post evaluation designs in which program theory development and monitoring frameworks are often completed before the evaluator is engaged. In this chapter, we argue that theory‐based evaluation (TBE) approaches can address unique ex‐post evaluation challenges that complexity‐aware evaluation (CAE) alone cannot, and that these two sets of approaches are complimentary. We will outline strategies that evaluators may use to conduct rigorous ex‐post evaluations of democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) interventions that merge CAE's inductive approaches with a theory‐testing structure. It will illustrate these strategies with two case studies of ex‐post evaluation using process tracing (PT).