Person

Giel Ton

Giel Ton

Research Fellow

Giel Ton is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and Director of the Centre for Development Impact. He specializes in the design of mixed-methods research on agricultural value chains and private-sector development. He promotes Contribution Analysis as an overarching approach of theory-based evaluation and a stepwise process to identify the hot spots where additional data collection and reflection is needed. He co-convenes the professional course Contribution Analysis for Impact Evaluation.

He applies his methodological skills to projects relating to institutional arrangements and collective action in agricultural value chains, such as collective marketing, certification, and market system development. Currently, he is involved in research on the governance of food safety in urban food markets in Peru (GICCAP), the scaling of inclusive business projects in Africa (2SCALE), the impact evaluation of a private sector development programme in Ethiopia (PEPE), sustainable intensification in poultry production (One Health Poultry Hub) and social protection and action research on child labour in Bangladesh (CLARISSA).

Most of these projects focus directly or indirectly on value chain governance and coordination. These imply configurations of incentives and institutional arrangements as ‘value chain governance mechanisms’. These mechanisms are based on an amalgam of (sometimes conflicting) formal and informal rules and regulations. Giel’s research focuses on those chains in the value chain where smallholders, local agents, farmer groups and traders exchange agricultural products or related services and negotiate the quality attributes, risks, and rewards in these transactions. In this analysis, he explores the role of other influencing factors and actors upstream or downstream of the value chain and in the institutional environment and the inequity of power in those relations.

To do so, he tries to analyse the heterogeneity of effects/impact, using the core question of realist evaluation: What works for whom under what conditions, and why?  A realist analysis typically results in various context-mechanism outcome configurations (CMOs) that explain why certain contextual characteristics make that specific subgroups of actors benefit (or not) from particular support activities.

One of Giel’s latest publications, Contribution, Causality, Context, and Contingency when Evaluating Inclusive Business Programmes’, elaborates on the methodological challenges of evaluating impacts in inclusive business programmes and highlights the promises of a behavioural system lens to identify the relevant context conditions that make interventions work for some, and not for others.

Often the only way to know whether one factor in a configuration of factors makes a difference is to ask it to the ones that know their complex environment best. Therefore, In the paper ‘Evaluating the impact of business coaching programmes by taking perceptions seriously’, he piloted a survey module that helps reflecting on a large set of outcomes, computing so-called Contribution. Similarly, Contribution Scores were applied in the evaluation of a large private sector development programme, documented in the paper ‘Assessing the ‘Contribution to market system change of the Private Enterprise Programme Ethiopia’, where he used these scores, together with the process-tracing of the main impact stories, to get a plausible estimate of the programme’s impact on job creation.

Research

Project

Newton UK Peru Foodborne Diseases and Public Health Governance

IDS is part of a research consortium that implements the MRC-Newton project ‘Foodborne diseases and public health governance: comparing food safety consumer preferences and governance in the supply of meat to urban markets. The overall aim in this project is to propose public health policies...

Project

Closing the Living Wage Gap 2022 – 2025

The research is targeted to the baseline phase of a four-year research effort to explore the living wage (LW) approach set out in the 2020 Rainforest Alliance (RA) Sustainable Agriculture Standard. The new standard requires that all workers receive at least the minimum wage in their country and...

Project

Backstopping 2SCALE

With the financial support from the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation (DGIS), the 2SCALE programme started in June 2012, and is one of the largest incubators of inclusive agribusiness in sub-Saharan Africa. 2SCALE provides a range of support services to private partners – companies and...

Opinions

Opinion

CDI@10: Replace Impact Evaluation with Contribution Analysis

The term Contribution Analysis was introduced by the late John Mayne 25 years ago when he wanted to motivate people involved in development programmes to look at their rationale and impact critically. It opened the field of impact evaluation to alternative methods, when econometric methodologies...

16 May 2024

Opinion

Food certification schemes, impact and existential questions

Certification systems, like Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and organic agriculture are crucial social capital in the food system. They need to show that they are credible. Therefore, a large part of published research on sustainability in food production concerns the impact of certification. The...

31 July 2019

Publications

Report

CLARISSA Cash Plus Social Protection Intervention: An Evaluation

CLARISSA Research and Evidence Paper 12

This paper presents the results of the multi-method evaluation of the CLARISSA Cash Plus pilot, which was an innovative social protection scheme for tackling social ills, including the worst forms of child labour.

Neil Howard & 5 others

24 June 2024

Report

People’s Agenda for Pandemic Preparedness

In May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Covid-19 is no longer a health emergency. Now that the world is in this new period of living with the coronavirus, it is an important time to gather knowledge gained from our experiences. Over 50 researchers from 25 countries...

Catherine Grant
Catherine Grant & 50 others

30 May 2023

Giel Ton’s recent work

Specialist short course

Contribution Analysis for Impact Evaluation

Short course to equip individuals and organisations to more effectively design impact evaluations using a contribution analysis framing.

From 13 January 2025 until 17 January 2025

Past Event

Evaluating capacity-strengthening impact: A funder perspective

In this Centre for Development Impact (CDI) webinar, Peter Taylor will discuss his learnings as a commissioner of a large multi-country programme The Think Tank Initiative (TTI) for strengthening for thinktanks in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It offered flexible, long-term funding combined...

6 October 2022