IMPACT
How did this collaboration create an impact?
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STORIES THAT BEST EXEMPLIFY THE WASTE COLLABORATION'S IMPACT
Impact stories highlight how a program can make real-world contributions and influence real-world achievements. The two stories highlighted below were chosen out of 14 submissions as best exemplifying the impact of the Waste and Circular Economy Collaboration.
These 'impact stories' were identified and prioritised at our final steering committee meeting in March 2021 with the BWA Advisory Board and the entire consortium.
The WCE Collaboration were in the right place, at the right time, to help apply research findings to policy recommendations.
Our trial intervention using the Circular Strategies workshop series successfully lead to a follow-on collaboration.
HOW DID WE MEASURE IMPACT THROUGH THE COLLABORATION?
When we began to develop the collaboration in a co-design workshop in November 2018, it quickly became apparent we wanted to do more than find effective behaviour change interventions. By July 2019 this intent crystallised into the below guiding theory of change for the program:
FOUNDATIONS: We developed a strong foundation of collaboration and capacity building by prioritising creating a welcoming platform;
NEW UNDERSTANDING: thus, increased the chances of successfully identifying behaviours important in pressing policy and practice challenges in waste and circular economy, and finding out how to change them through the cultivation of new understands;
CLEAR EVIDENCE: which, because projects are co-designed and co-produced to reflect the needs of priority stakeholders in our partner organisations and trial partners, will lead to actionable insights and clear evidence of appropriate next steps;
FUTURE ADVANCES: thereby producing insights for future advances and increasing the chances of supporting social innovation that can be built on our work;
IMPACT: that goes towards our ultimate intended impact of contributing to increasing the circularity of the Australian (and global) economy.
Our guiding theory of change: progress through foundations to impact (left); and how each stage is measured (right)
Our evaluation approach recognises that the further along that chain we go, the less in our control each level of outcomes and impact is, but also the more significant it is. It also recognises that our opportunities to pre-specify and rigorously measure different changes resulting from our work diminish along the same spectrum. An important tool for measuring outcomes and impacts higher up the spectrum that reflects these considerations is our use of 'impact stories' (combining 'Contribution Analysis' with 'Most Significant Change' techniques).