You say attribution, I say contribution. Can we agree?
I just found a Twitter thread from a few months back, started by Adam Kessler, and thought I'd put my contribution to it (haha) it here on LinkedIn. We were talking about the difference between attribution and contribution. The trouble is that there is no "official" distinction, the difference between attribution and contribution can mean different things. This can lead to arguments and misunderstandings, if I'm thinking of one and you're thinking of another, and we don't realise. We should accept that there are different ways to use the words and only worry about whether there are any disagreements of substance (from which we might learn something) rather than terminology (from which we won’t).
The distinction between contribution and attribution can be just about direction:
The saving of 10 additional lives can be attributed to the NGO.
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The NGO’s contribution was the saving of 10 additional lives.
(thinking of the sort of slightly artificial (and gruesome) scenario where you could really assign results to impact in that way)
The distinction between contribution and attribution can be about parts versus wholes:
The passing of the law cannot be completely attributed to the efforts of the NGO.
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The NGO made a contribution to the passing of the law.
As Howard White (2010) argues, this is a fairly pointless distinction, anyway we sometimes we talk about partial attribution as well.
The distinction between contribution and attribution can be about level of proof/certainty:
The saving of 10 additional lives can be attributed to the efforts of the NGO: we have some kind of heavy evidence, perhaps involving a counterfactual, or calculations based on accepted laws.
As opposed to: The NGO probably made some kind of contribution to the passing of the law, but we can’t really be sure, and we certainly couldn’t express it as a number or proportion.
This means that sometimes when we talk about “contribution” as opposed to "attribution" we expect an answer to questions like “how much of a contribution” and expect an answer which can be compared with others, e.g. “over 50%” or “more than that other NGO”: contributions as slices of a pie. We don't use the word, "attribution" in this way at all.
And sometimes, ironically, we use “contribution” to mean exactly the opposite, as in the NGO’s contribution to a law being passed, when we certainly couldn’t calculate a proportion even roughly, perhaps because there are different ways to get the same result. John Mayne’s Contribution Analysis is thinking in this way, I believe.
To conclude
As Howard White argues, much of the heat in this debate is just because one group of people insist on using the words in one way, and another group insist on using them in another. We should accept that there are different ways to use the words and only worry about whether there are any disagreements of substance (from which we might learn something) rather than terminology (from which we won’t).
?? causalmap.app. Mad about causal mapping & evaluation.
3 年Seems that for a lot of people, the most important distinction is that we want to talk about the contribution of X to Y in order to explicitly say that X was just one of the things that influenced or led to Y. And that's fine. In real life this will nearly always be the case. But you just as easily express this by saying "Y can be (only) partially attributed to X".
?? causalmap.app. Mad about causal mapping & evaluation.
3 年I just updated the article to hopefully make it all a bit clearer. And added a link to Howard White's article: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Howard_White2/publication/249744039_A_Contribution_to_Current_Debates_in_Impact_Evaluation/links/53f46e320cf22be01c3eb647/A-Contribution-to-Current-Debates-in-Impact-Evaluation.pdf
Top Voice | Decolonial and Participatory M&E | Intersectional DEI | Challenging power by practicing RADIQUAL approaches to social impact
3 年Interesting - they are often used interchangeably but the distinction is important. An advocacy group would be one of several campaigning for housing law reforms, and can't be solely responsible for any changes. But a relief organisation may directly be responsible for providing shelter and services during a flood - there is a difference, however slight. The responsibility is on the evaluator/writer to clarify this in any reports though. And attributing (!) social change to the actions of one group alone can be a slippery slope.
Director: Strategic planning management and analysis/Evaluator
3 年Still I maintain a clear distinction. Our challenge is that in development programs the distinction doesn’t help us much since there’s no sole contributor hence the question of attribution becomes irrelevant. Thanks for sharing Steve
Independent Monitoring and Evaluation Consultant
3 年I tend to agree with Howard, so much time wasted on such a tedious distinction. And I suspect "attribution claims " are often a straw man, put up to be knocked down.