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Over the last four decades, the aid industry has invested increasingly in variants of Community-Driven Development programming in conflict-affected contexts. There have been considerable efforts to draw lessons from experience and the results of evaluations. General suggestions for improvement range from larger investments to greater engagement with government at national and sub-national levels to extended or repeated program cycles. Advances in measurement and evaluation strategies are also evident.

Nevertheless, policymakers and practitioners need to get better at making clear statements about why and how we believe CDD interventions would lead to the desired outcomes. Informed by social theory and knowledge of context, these statements are important for CDD policy, practice and learning. They contribute to decisions about the types of problems that the approach can most effectively address, the appropriateness of a CDD intervention in a given context, the alternative strategies to which a given intervention should be compared and the types of contextual, operational and process information that is needed before, during and after an intervention. Most fundamentally, theory is the foundation of programme logic and design.

This paper suggests several steps towards developing an explicit theory of change for a CDD intervention. Deciding whether a CDD intervention is meant to primarily deliver outputs or change processes and behaviour and whether it is meant to improve efficiency, fill a gap or transform institutions is the first step. These objectives require very different theoretical frameworks, assumptions and causal mechanisms. Similarly, the desired outcome must be prioritized and specified as precisely as possible. This represents a departure from the common practice of aiming to achieve improvements in at least three related but different outcomes (welfare, governance and social cohesion). Next, examination of the core processes of the CDD strategy in relation to the implementation context is important both before and after the development of a theory of change. Thinking through how the core processes – community definition, information dissemination, convening, deliberation, preference articulation, commitment and performance – could occur and what would facilitate these processes given both what we know from social theory and from the context is also important for developing a theory of change. Finally, with the objective, outcome and core processes specified, theories from a range of social sciences can be drawn upon to develop plausible change pathways and their corresponding assumptions. With this theory of change and contextual information, practitioners can begin to parse out design options.

In many ways, the focus on theory is a step back. Given that there are no precise “off-the-shelf” models that predict social change, having more theoretically grounded motivations and expectations for what we do and how we do it will get us closer to understanding what ‘works’, what doesn’t, why and what we should do differently. Although there is now more evidence on the effectiveness of CDD, understanding why we observe some trends and not others remains difficult if programme design does not clearly reflect sound social theory. Developing the theories that underpin CDD interventions would benefit practitioners and policymakers who also invest in the wide range of participatory strategies that also employ similar ‘bottom-up’ principles. Despite our urgent desire to develop scalable and easily replicable solutions to problems in conflicted-affected contexts, the process is a long and iterative one in which we have to try, learn, adapt and try again. If in stepping back we are able to try again with more theoretically grounded and contextually appropriate interventions, we believe it is a step worth taking.