Hoverview

logframe · programme design · results frameworks · theory of change

Build the theory of change first, derive the logframe from it

The theory of change, the results framework and the logframe are not three documents. They are three views of one set of causal claims, progressively filtered.

Most programme teams write the logframe first. The donor asked for one, the template is sitting in the email, and the deadline is closer than it should be. The theory of change gets written later, sometimes weeks later, to satisfy a different section of the proposal. By the time it exists, the logframe is already submitted, which means the theory of change is not explaining the programme's logic. It is justifying the logframe's structure after the fact.

The sequence should be reversed, and the reason is structural rather than philosophical. A theory of change contains causal claims that sit outside the project's control. A logframe does not. Everything in the logframe should be derivable from the theory of change by filtering out what the project cannot control and then applying a donor's template rules to what remains. If the logframe is written first, there is nothing to derive it from, and the template's structure becomes the programme's logic by default.

That claim is testable. If it holds, the same theory of change should produce different logframes under different donor templates, without anyone redesigning the programme. If it does not hold, the theory of change and the logframe are genuinely independent documents, and the sector's habit of writing them separately is correct.

Three artefacts, one set of causal claims

The distinction between a theory of change, a results framework and a logframe is well documented in the training literature, but the relationship between them is rarely stated precisely enough to be useful.

The MEAL DPro curriculum (Humentum, 2023) defines the boundary. The theory of change contains the preconditions required to achieve a long-term change, whether they are inside or outside of the project's direct control. The results framework includes only the interventions that are the direct responsibility of the project team. And the first column of the logframe contains the objectives statements that were first created for the results framework, plus an activity level the results framework does not carry.

That definition implies a filtering sequence, not a drafting sequence. The theory of change is the full set of causal claims: what the programme will do, what external conditions must hold, and how the two connect. The results framework is the subset of those claims that fall within the project's control. The logframe is the results framework rendered under a specific donor's template rules, with activities added and assumptions surfaced at the levels the donor requires.

Each step removes something. The results framework removes external preconditions. The logframe removes whatever the donor's template has no slot for, and adds the measurement apparatus (indicators, baselines, targets, means of verification) at the levels the template specifies. Nothing is added that was not already present in the theory of change, except the measurement layer, which is about how to verify a claim rather than what the claim is.

What the theory of change holds that the logframe cannot

The most important content in a theory of change is the content that will not appear in any logframe: the causal conditions outside the project's control.

Consider a cyclone early-warning programme in the Pacific. The theory of change includes a precondition: the national meteorological service maintains SMS alert coverage in the target provinces. That precondition is real, it is necessary for the programme's outcomes to hold, and it is outside the project's control. It belongs in the theory of change because the theory is supposed to make the full causal logic visible, including the parts that could fail for reasons the programme cannot address.

No logframe template has a cell for this. The UK guidance from 2011 permits assumptions at outcome and output level only, which is the closest any template comes, but an assumption is not the same thing as an external precondition. An assumption says: we believe this condition will hold. A precondition says: this condition must hold for the causal chain to work, and here is where it sits in the chain. The difference is structural. An assumption is a note attached to a level. A precondition is a node in the causal graph with edges connecting it to the results it enables.

The CDC Program Evaluation Framework Action Guide (2025) comes closest to capturing this. Its logic model template includes a contextual-factors box for influences that sit outside the programme's control. But even there, the contextual factors are a box beside the diagram, not nodes inside it. The causal relationship between an external factor and a programme outcome is visible in a well-drawn theory of change and invisible in every logframe template reviewed.

Des Gasper, writing at ISS The Hague in 2000, identified the deeper problem. The logframe method conflates sufficient and necessary conditions. A bare link between two levels cannot say whether the lower level is sufficient for the higher one, merely necessary for it, or one of several contributing causes. A theory of change drawn as a graph can make those distinctions, because the graph can carry typed edges: this link is necessary, this one is contributory, this one is sufficient only if the external precondition also holds. The logframe's tree structure cannot carry that information, because a tree has only one kind of edge.

What happens when the logframe comes first

When the logframe is written before the theory of change, the template's structure becomes the programme's causal logic. This happens silently and it is difficult to reverse.

A donor template that permits one outcome forces the programme to choose a single top-level result. If the theory of change had been built first, the programme might have identified two outcomes connected by an external precondition: one within the project's control, one dependent on a government partner's action. The theory of change would hold both, mark the second as external, and the results framework would filter it out. The logframe would carry only the first, honestly.

Without the theory of change, the team faces the template's single outcome slot and does one of two things. It either combines the two outcomes into one statement broad enough to cover both, which produces an outcome that is unmeasurable because it conflates what the programme controls with what it does not. Or it drops the second outcome entirely, which produces a logframe that is internally consistent but does not represent the programme's actual logic. Either way, the template has made a design decision that the theory of change should have made.

The pattern recurs at every level. The Asian Development Bank's DMF guidelines (2024) do not include impact-level indicators, because the ADB does not consider project-level impact measurable through a project's own monitoring. A team that writes the ADB logframe first and the theory of change second will design a programme with no impact claim, because the template has no slot for one. A team that writes the theory of change first will have an impact claim in the graph, will filter it out of the results framework on attribution grounds, and will know exactly what the logframe is not claiming and why.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Logic Model Development Guide (2004) makes the point differently. It states that a logic model does not have to be linear and may appear as a simple image or concept map. It also binds outcomes to time bands: short-term at one to three years, long-term at four to six, impact at seven to ten. A linear logframe template collapses those time bands into levels, losing the temporal dimension entirely. A theory of change built first can hold the time bands, and the logframe derivation step is where the loss is made visible and deliberate.

The derivation in practice

If the theory of change is built first, deriving the logframe is a sequence of explicit operations, each of which removes something and records what it removed.

The first operation is the controllability filter. Every node in the theory of change is either within the project's control, influenceable by the project, or external. The results framework keeps the first two categories. External preconditions are excluded, but their exclusion is recorded: this condition was part of the theory of change, it is not part of the results framework, and here is why. WWF's project and programme management standards (2012) already require this kind of scope distinction, because the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation distinguish between results a project can achieve directly and results it can influence but not control.

The second operation is level assignment. Rosenberg and Posner's original 1979 formulation for Practical Concepts Incorporated described the cascade: an output at one level becomes the purpose at the next. Gasper's observation that levels are contextual, not inherent, means the same statement can be an output or an outcome depending on the frame. In the derivation model, level assignment happens at this step, not during the theory of change, because it is a property of the rendering, not of the causal claim.

The third operation is the donor frame. The frame specifies how many outcomes are permitted, which columns exist, whether activities appear in the matrix or in a separate document, whether the indicator carries its own target or whether targets sit in a separate column, and what governance rules apply to changes. Defra's Biodiversity Challenge Funds head the indicator column with the composed form. The UK guidance separates indicator and target. Each frame produces a different logframe from the same results framework, and each logframe is an honest rendering of the same programme under different rules.

The fourth operation is the measurement layer. Indicators, baselines, targets and means of verification attach to the logframe at the levels the template specifies, using the atom structure the donor requires. This is new content that does not exist in the theory of change, but it is content about verification, not about causation. The causal claims were already settled before the measurement layer was added.

What the derivation makes visible

The practical gain is not elegance. It is auditability.

When the logframe is derived from the theory of change, every exclusion has a reason. The external precondition was excluded because the project does not control it. The second outcome was folded into a sub-output because the donor permits only one outcome. The impact claim was removed because the ADB's frame does not carry impact indicators. Each of those decisions is recorded, which means each can be reviewed, challenged, and reversed if the donor's template changes or if the programme reports to a second donor under a different frame.

When the logframe is written directly from the template, those decisions are invisible, because they were never made explicitly. The programme has one outcome because the template has one outcome row, not because someone decided that a single outcome is the honest representation of the programme's causal logic. Nobody recorded the alternative, so nobody can recover it.

The difference matters most when a programme reports to more than one donor. The Green Climate Fund's template (2022) permits two to three outcomes and has no means-of-verification column. The UK frame permits one outcome and requires a means-of-verification column. A programme reporting to both needs two logframes. If those logframes are derived from the same theory of change, the differences between them are documented and explicable: this donor's frame includes a column that donor's frame does not, and this donor permits more outcomes than that one. If the logframes were written independently, each from its own template, the differences are accidental, undocumented, and likely to contradict each other in ways that surface during a review.

Where the argument is weakest

Two objections are real, and ignoring them would make this post dishonest.

The first is time. A theory of change takes longer to build than a logframe, and many programme teams do not have the time. The template arrives with a deadline, and writing a theory of change before filling in the template means the deadline is tighter. The honest answer is that the time is not saved, it is deferred: a logframe written without a theory of change produces rework when the proposal narrative requires causal reasoning the logframe does not contain, when the first annual review asks how the programme expected its outcome to hold given conditions it never articulated, or when a second donor asks for a framework that cannot be derived from the first because the first was shaped by its template rather than by the programme's logic.

The second is that some donors do not ask for a theory of change at all. The National Lottery Community Fund's Reaching Communities guidance does not mind how applicants share information about planned activities and expected outcomes. It suggests four columns with no targets, no baselines and no assumptions. If no donor is asking for a theory of change, building one is an investment in the programme's own clarity, and whether that investment is justified depends on the programme's complexity and how many donors it expects to report to over its life. For a single-funder, single-year project with a simple delivery chain, the theory of change may genuinely be the logframe, and building a separate one creates paperwork without creating understanding.

What the post cannot resolve is whether the sector's current practice of writing the logframe first is a pragmatic response to real constraints, or a structural habit that produces worse programmes at the same cost. Both explanations fit the evidence, and distinguishing between them would require data on rework rates and review outcomes that nobody, as far as the published literature shows, has collected.

Sources

Definitions and curriculum

  • MEAL DPro, Humentum (2023). Source for the theory of change containing preconditions "whether they are inside or outside of the project's direct control", the results framework including "only interventions that are the direct responsibility of the project team", and the logframe's first column containing "the objectives statements that were first created for the RF"
  • W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Logic Model Development Guide (2004). Source for the non-linear format, the concept-map permission, and the time-banded outcome structure. NACCHO mirror; wkkf.org would not serve the PDF

Academic and practitioner critique

Donor frameworks quoted

Evaluation method