Marina et al Rethinking rigour to embrace complexity in peacebuilding evaluation

600 bricolage

The article critiques dominant peacebuilding evaluation models for their rigid conceptions of rigour and calls for more adaptive, participatory approaches suitable for complex contexts. It introduces an inclusive rigour framework based on three interrelated domains:

Methodological bricolage – Flexible, pragmatic mixing of methods tailored to context and evolving questions.
Meaningful participation and inclusion – Emphasizing power dynamics and involving marginalized voices in co-creating evaluation processes.
Utilisation and impact – Ensuring evaluations produce actionable, contextually grounded learning for diverse stakeholders.

These are supported by enabling environments (e.g. equitable partnerships, supportive institutions) and evaluator competencies (e.g. reflexivity, political awareness).

Three case studies (Mali, Colombia Co-Inspira, Colombia Everyday Justice) illustrate application of the framework and highlight tensions between methodological rigor, participatory inclusion, and institutional expectations. The authors advocate redefining rigour as iterative, responsive, and grounded in local realities.

“Rigour here is not defined by methodological choice alone, but rather, relies on an active view of evolving methodological choices throughout an iterative process” (p. 2).
“Inclusive rigour… centres plural perspectives and use value over rigid hierarchies of evidence” (p. 5).

But in the slides it says

The values we ground the design in are:

Seeking equity, and this was heavily covered in the previous training on rigor, recognizing participatory processes will increase the rigor of causal findings, but we will also explore it in this training as well.
Informing strategy, and this was also covered in the previous training with a focus on the types of learning spaces we need to create. We’ll lightly touch on it here.
Embracing complexity, and we will discuss how to do this through our bricolage (or combining) of methods. This is very much a focus of today’s training.