state. Using CDD to strengthen the social compact may require additional project activities such as public information campaigns (Baseler et al 2023).

Second, CDD’s focus on outcomes beyond inclusion (particularly beyond indicators related to public infrastructure and services) is relatively new and evaluations have not caught up to the new focus on resilience, cohesion, and process legitimacy outcomes. An increasing number of CDD operations are seeking to influence outcomes such as trust in government and between communities, and resilience to climate change and other shocks. Yet attempts to measure whether CDD projects are contributing to such outcomes are still in their infancy.

Third, research designs that are typically seen as ‘gold standard’ may not be best suited to measuring these outcomes. In part, this is because of the inherent challenges associated with the gap between concepts and measures for many social phenomena; in part, it is because surveys, which collect data with a relatively short interface between the researcher/enumerator and the interviewee, are often not the best way to collect data on sensitive social issues. It is also because the timelines through which change happens in areas such as institution-building and social norms change often far exceed the lifetime of projects (and hence the periods for which their impacts are evaluated). A null finding in the short run does not necessarily mean a project had no impact; it may have laid the foundation for future changes.

Fourth, and related, these outcomes typically do not make it into project results frameworks. This, in part, is because these outcomes are typically not fully under the control of projects but are a result of the ways in which projects interrelate with a host of exogenous forces, many of which are non-linear and that may take years to be realized. Incentives for project team leaders are to select indicators which projects have a strong chance of achieving. Project documents often imply that projects will shape these outcomes (e.g., “CDD can help reduce fragility”) but teams, understandably, do not want to be held accountable for achieving these aims. But these imperatives have worked against our understanding of how external actors can support processes such as institution building which are key for development.

Moving forward, it is important to unpack these broad concepts and to map project designs to a theory of change with clearly defined outcomes. Project documents often implicitly claim they will affect social outcomes but do not measure these outcomes and are not always designed in ways that would logically allow them to be achieved. There is a need to be realistic about what projects can achieve and to map interventions more clearly to outcomes _._ In parallel, it is important for evaluators to pay attention to actual project investments and not to test performance against outcomes that projects have never been designed to achieve. By extension, it is also entirely plausible that unanticipated positive and negative outcomes may be associated a given CDD intervention, which qualitative approaches may be best suited to discerning (see Rao et al 2017).

It is equally important to identify measurable indicators for these outcomes and to use appropriate methods to measure the indicators. Some of these lend themselves to quantitative measures, but some may not (and, in most cases, the use of multiple methods will be suitable to triangulate and better understand survey data). Not all outcomes will have simple indicators that can be included in project results frameworks.

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