Mapping Upstream Strategies: Monitoring Policy Influence Using Interorganizational Network Analysis

Policy influence is produced through relationships among government agencies, civil society organizations, donors, international organizations, and other actors rather than through formal authority alone. Yet conventional monitoring systems often struggle to observe these upstream relational processes when policy change is incremental, distributed, and difficult to attribute. This Methods Note demonstrates how interorganizational network analysis (IONA) can be organized into a monitoring workflow for upstream policy influence. Drawing on a 2024 UNICEF program evaluation, the Note presents a workflow for defining monitoring questions, specifying policy issues and network boundaries, collecting relational data, constructing weighted ties, selecting indicators, and interpreting findings for adaptive management. The workflow is illustrated through a 2023 Technical Assistance and Capacity Building network in the country of Georgia, establishing baseline measures of organizational positioning, community structure, and brokerage. The Note shows how repeated IONA can track relational change over time and provide evidence for adapting policy-influence strategies.