Over the last decade, societal pressure has increased on public research agencies to provide evidence that their research contributes to achieve development goals. To address this challenge, the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development (Cirad), developed an ex-post impact assessment method based on the impact pathway…

Over the past decade, renewed societal demands on public research have been structured by various generic issues, while others are specific to the context of developing countries. In the first part of this article, after reviewing those issues, we examine how they reshape the analytical frameworks that structure the understanding of causal…