I recently attended a conference on Bricolage in evaluation, organised by the Outcome Mapping Learning Community. Before I explain what I mean by bricolage, I want to trace something about my own development as an evaluator because I think it mirrors the journey of many African evaluators of my cohort. 

We learned by doing. When I started out 25 years ago, there was no evaluation degree. I never encountered the evaluation theory tree until about eight years ago, and when I did, I noticed it was populated almost entirely by American names. We learned by reading, and by watching. 

When funders sent evaluators to assess projects in South Africa, I would be brought in as the local consultant – helping with fieldwork, context, and logistics. The pattern was consistent: arrive in country, spend a week or two talking to people, leave, write a report. This was “bog standard evaluation.” Extract, report, move on. 

But South Africa had another tradition running in parallel: Participatory Rural Appraisal, participatory development, organisations like OLIVE and the Community Development Resource Association, humanities departments teaching qualitative inquiry and critical theory. We mashed things together. We built something that made sense to us and to our clients. As commissioners began demanding more “rigorous” frameworks – qualitative data was too “anecdotal,” apparently – we found ways to justify what we were already doing. But it was never our intention to follow any single approach to the letter. That just didn’t seem necessary or honest or feasible. Julius Nyangaga expressed a similar sentiment in his post, https://tinyurl.com/3d8ksre4 

When I arrived at the bricolage conference in December, I realised something: what was new for me wasn’t the practice. What was new was the permission to name it. 

For years, African evaluators have been doing something quietly radical. We adapt. We improvise with care. We borrow what works, drop what doesn’t, and build patchwork designs that fit real programmes, real politics, real communities. We have had to justify and negotiate those choices, often with commissioners who equate quality with methodological purity and who follow one approach in its entirety, step by step. 

Bricolage gave me a defensible place to stand. Not because evaluators want to be rebellious, but because legitimacy is political. It is negotiated with funders, commissioners, peer communities and sometimes an invisible group of methods police who patrol the boundaries of what counts as real evaluation. Bricolage doesn’t abolish those dynamics. But it gives us a language for practising honestly within them. 

I went to the conference thinking bricolage meant “mixing methods.” I left with a more precise understanding. 

Bricolage is not simply combining different types of data, that is mixed methods. Bricolage is about making conscious choices about paradigms, values, inquiry traditions, and method components: what to keep, what to adapt, what to leave out[i]. It operates at two levels simultaneously. 

At the macro level, it involves re-combining whole approaches which may represent different orientations, for example, using Outcome Harvesting (A non-theory based approach) with Contribution Analysis (A theory-based approach). At the micro level, it involves selecting specific components, perhaps even something as particular as using a Most-Significant Change line of questioning within an Outcome Harvesting process. 

This distinction matters. In a recent evaluation, my team combined Outcome Harvesting with Realist Evaluation. But we used a realist lens during data collection, rather than implementing a full realist process with its specific interview technique. So, we stopped claiming we were “doing realist evaluation.” Instead, we said we had done an Outcome Harvest with a realist lens. That framing is more honest. It acknowledges that we borrowed the explanatory power of realism without pretending we had implemented the branded approach in full. 

Bricolage is, in part, permission to speak that truth. 

Another thread from the conference stayed with me: as most practicing evaluator know, evaluation does not happen in a laboratory. 

You may plan a focus group for an evaluation of a rural pre-school, and when you arrive, all the parents are waiting to talk to you. You may line up a series of interviews, only to find that everyone is at a conference across town and you end up going to the conference venue, and engaging people in opportunistic conversations on the side-lines of the conference, and learning more than through your carefully planned protocol. Both of these have happened to me. 

The point is not that planning doesn’t matter. The point is that adaptation that forces you out of a strict methodological process is not a sign of failure. The sign of failure is pretending you didn’t adapt. Bricolage, at its best, is a commitment to being transparent about design choices you make along the way, precisely because things change. 

If many practitioners have naturally been doing bricolage, what does the framework actually add? I came to four answers. 

First, it gives permission to be creative – not creativity as decoration, but as the capacity to build fit-for-purpose designs in complex, politically charged contexts. Second, it centres values as a methodological consideration, not an afterthought. Bricolage is not only about methods. It is about what matters and who matters (which is similar to the values arguments in Made in Africa Evaluation). Third, it provides a framework to legitimise practice – something to point to when explaining an unconventional design to a funder or commissioner used to standard templates. And fourth, it is a reminder to be honest and transparent: to document design choices before and during an evaluation, not just in the final report. 

On the boundary question – when does adaptation go too far? One practical principle emerged for me. Instead of claiming to be doing a particular approach, consider describing your design as a best-fit combination, and be explicit about what you have kept and what you have dropped. Can you still call it Outcome Harvesting if it doesn’t include substantiation? Can you call it realist if you haven’t used realist interviewing? These are not pedantic questions. They are legitimacy questions – and bricolage helps you answer them honestly. (Barbara Klugman addresses the question of boundaries in her post here https://tinyurl.com/28wpanvc) 

On values and participation – who frames the evaluation questions? Who defines “significant change”? Whose knowledge counts as evidence, and whose is treated as anecdote? From an African feminist and decolonial lens, these are not optional questions. They are the questions. Bricolage can reproduce a familiar pattern of external expertise recombining methods for external accountability, or it can create space for something more participatory and just. 

On positionality – bricolage does not happen in a neutral universe. When I teach the Masters Programme at the University of Cape Town, one of the first things I ask students is to locate themselves: their background, their discipline, their worldview, their positionality. Are they an anthropologist, an economist, a political scientist? Are they oriented toward social justice, systems thinking, free-market principles? These lenses shape what components of any approach we choose to use, how we combine them, what we count as evidence, and what recommendations we make. Bricolage gives us both the chance and the obligation to make those lenses explicit. 

On teaching – this conference has shifted something practical for me. In my MA course, I have previously guided students through selecting one method per evaluation question using multi-component evaluation as a framework. Going forward, I will encourage them to think about intentional recombination and to document and justify those choices. Not as a free-for-all, but as a craft: start with purpose, context, stakeholders, and values; decide whose voices count; choose methods and lenses that do the work needed; be explicit about what you keep and what you drop; and reflect on what rigour means in this specific context. 

The real question is not whether bricolage happens. It already does. The real question is whether we do it intentionally, ethically, and transparently. 

Bricolage gave me permission to be honest about the work we do  and the responsibility to do it well. The next step for the field is to treat bricolage not as a trendy label, but as a disciplined practice: grounded in context, clear about values, attentive to power, and accountable to the people who matter most. 

Visit the OMLC bricolage page for more information https://www.outcomemapping.org/bricolage 

I would like to thank the OMLC learning community and stewards for the conference, the engaging and generous community of participants, and to IDRC for making it possible for me to attend, and Mark Abrahams for your thoughtful review. 

[i] Aston, T., & Apgar, M. (2022). The art and craft of bricolage in evaluation. ​ Centre for Development Impact Practice Paper, Institute of Development Studies. ​ https://doi.org/10.19088/IDS.2022.068 ​  to collaborate? Ready to step onto the bridge, let’s talk about synthesising solutions today.