RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach (ROMA): A Guide to Policy Engagement and Influence

"Policy processes can be highly political, sometimes involving dense networks of actors and coalitions with competing values and interests. Engaging with policy in these types of environment requires a collaborative approach, and ROMA has been designed specifically to facilitate collaborative engagement."

This guide to understanding, engaging with, and influencing policy emerges from work of the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) team at Overseas Development Institute (ODI), whose research and advisory work has focused on how research-based evidence can contribute to sustainable policy change. The RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach (ROMA) draws heavily on the concepts underpinning Outcome Mapping (OM). Developed in the early 2000s, OM is an approach to fostering change that centres on understanding how different actors behave and how changing the behaviour of one actor fosters change in another. ROMA comprises a suite of tools that any organisation can use at any stage in their policy engagement process to improve how they diagnose the problem, understand the types of impact their work could have on policymaking, set realistic objectives for policy influence, develop a plan to achieve those objectives, monitor and learn from the progress they are making, and reflect this learning back into their work. ROMA is a whole system approach, not a step-by-step methodology. It is a process of constant reflection and learning, not based on the idea of linear change.

Chapter 1 shows how important it is to diagnose the problem thoroughly in order to help understand better what issues need to be worked on and with whom and what their motivations might be for collaborating. ROMA offers different tools for this, such as a first approximation with the "five whys" technique and a more detailed diagnosis with the fishbone diagram. A case study from Nepal demonstrates that changing policy is by no means the only goal: There are many other issues that need to be addressed to improve the way, for example, migrant workers are treated. The second part of Chapter 1 helps the reader further diagnose complex issues through a clear analytical framework for building the problem diagnosis in some detail into one's objective and approach. Discussions around the different headings (such as whether capacity to implement change is centralised or distributed) will help participants focus on key challenges and raise issues that can be further addressed throughout the rest of the ROMA process.

Chapter 2 outlines the ROMA process for planning an engagement strategy: a series of workshops that bring teams together to develop a shared understanding of their influencing strategy and to plan the process of engagement. "Good communication is central to ROMA and throughout the life of any policy-influencing project. Communication serves different purposes: influence will not come about by simply disseminating the results of your work and hoping they will be picked up. The more complex the problem you are addressing, the more likely it is you will need to adopt a knowledge-brokering approach. This will involve strengthening communications within networks of people and organisations, facilitating a collaborative approach to problem-solving and being involved in debates about change and how it happens. ROMA helps you understand what sort of communication and knowledge-brokering roles you could choose and what sorts of effects they are likely to have." Chapter 2 is less analytical than the previous chapter and looks instead at the questions, tools, and techniques to use in the workshops. Each workshop can be used separately to refine an ongoing engagement strategy. A case study describes how a World Vision team put ROMA into practice in Zambia.

Chapter 3 provides a framework and practical tools to help readers develop a clear plan for monitoring and learning. It answers the questions "why monitor?" and "what to monitor?" before presenting a list of different techniques for collecting the relevant information. "Traditional monitoring approaches, which rely on predefined indicators, do not work well in complex situations where the context changes (sometimes rapidly), new stakeholders come in and out of the picture or new evidence emerges. ROMA helps you develop a monitoring strategy that is appropriate to your purpose, the scale of your project and the context within which you are working." It ends with a section on different ways to make sense of all this information so teams can incorporate it into their forward work plans. The Conclusion briefly summarises the main lessons for the main audiences for this guide.