Research for Impact

Making a material contribution to positive outcomes for African landscapes and the people who depend on them is at the heart of all OPALS activities. Co-production approaches are embedded across the Programme, working closely with partners and stakeholders at the leading edge of landscape management and conservation governance in Africa to ensure that our research produces relevant, actionable information where it can make the most difference.

Whether the focus is on filling key knowledge or data gaps, developing decision support tools, or sharing learning from case studies, each project is designed around a carefully considered Theory of Change. This is used to continually reassess the project design, stakeholder engagement, and planned deliverables, ensuring effective outcomes. While each project is designed to deliver targeted outputs for a specific partner or user group, we also embed systems thinking approaches to consider how impact can be scaled by engaging wider networks across the continent.

We believe that our approach of embedding the impact agenda into the core of each project helps to foster ownership of the activities by our trainees, empowering them to drive forward their own projects while developing awareness of the wider context around their work. At the Programme level, we enact the following Theory of Change to design and articulate our intended impact and the outcomes, outputs, activities, and inputs required to achieve this impact. Learn more about Theory of Change frameworks at www.theoryofchange.org.