FROM NARRATIVES TO PATHWAYS Participatory causal analysis in evaluating contributions to systems change in the context of Brazilian education 2025

This case study tells the story of a collective evaluation and learning process that included five grantees (who we refer to as partners) of the philanthropic organization Imaginable Futures all working to advance equity in Brazilian formal and informal education systems. An adaptation of Outcome Harvesting (OH) (Wilson-Grau, 2018; Paz-Ybarnegaray and Douthwaite, 2017) was the overarching methodological approach chosen, with specific methods used in different moments of the journey, such as the COM-B model for understanding behaviour change (Mayne, 2019) and approaches to storytelling and listening (Burns, 2021; Sayem et al., 2022). The facilitated process included participatory learning sessions and moments of discussion and sense-making among representatives of the five organizations, as well as tailored support from the evaluation team to each. Our methodological innovation sits at the intersection of exploring causal pathways in systems change interventions and participatory evaluation, fields that are expanding and deepening to meet growing demands for meaningful evaluation. In this case study we reflect in particular on how we supported meaningful and robust participatory causal analysis within our methodological bricolage.