Roots of Change: A Realist Framework for Long-Term Rural Development Impact

How do we understand the long-term impact of organisations working to transform rural communities? Traditional evaluation approaches often focus on individual projects and short-term outcomes, making it difficult to capture the cumulative effects of sustained engagement over time. This report introduces the Rural Development Impact Framework (RDIF), an approach to assessing how organisations contribute to systemic change within a geography. Drawing on evidence from PRADAN’s work in Gumla (Jharkhand) and Dhamtari (Chhattisgarh), the study combines qualitative, quantitative, and geospatial methods to examine how livelihoods, institutions, collective action, and governance evolve over decades. The framework offers practitioners, funders, and evaluators a practical way to understand organisational contribution beyond attribution, revealing how lasting rural transformation emerges through the interaction of context, institutions, and human agency.