Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) is a practical planning, and monitoring and evaluation approach developed for use with complex projects in the water and food sectors . PIPA begins with a participatory workshop where stakeholders make explicit their assumptions about how their project will achieve an impact. Participants construct problem trees, carry out a visioning exercise and draw network maps to help them clarify their 'impact pathways'. These are then articulated in two logic models. The outcomes logic model describes the project's medium term objectives in the form of hypotheses: which actors need to change, what are those changes and which strategies are needed to realise these changes. The impact logic model describes how, by helping to achieve the expected outcomes, the project will impact on people's livelihoods. Participants derive outcome targets and milestones which are regularly revisited and revised as part of project monitoring and evaluation (M&E). PIPA goes beyond the traditional use of logic models and logframes by engaging stakeholders in a structured participatory process, promoting learning and providing a framework for 'action research' on processes of change.

Participatory impact pathways analysis (PIPA) is an evolving tool that offers project managers a deeper understanding of the results that projects might attain with specific partners so as to help set priorities and support funding proposals. In a participatory manner, two groups of information are generated for each project. First, a problem tree is developed to represent the pathways by which research outputs are linked with outcomes and impacts. Second, network maps identify the key players and the roles they must play during and after each project to ensure its success. These two views of a project's impact pathways (IPs) are integrated in an outcomes logic model that describes what strategies the project will use to bring about the necessary changes, or outcomes, in project stakeholders to achieve the project vision. PIPA complements existing project management tools, such as the logical framework, by describing project strategies to bring about change, whereas traditional project planning instruments focus more on the activities required to produce the research outputs. Only when research outputs are used do they contribute to change. Hence, together with traditional project planning, PIPA provides information to allow priority assessment on the basis of scrutiny of the plausibility and the size of the envisaged change. PIPA can help to design projects to achieve overall programmatic goals and can help select between competing strategies within a single project. In the latter case, by mapping out potential IPs with a range of stakeholders, all partners are informed about the potential options considered. This common understanding is informative even if the final decisions on what the project will actually do are made by the project staff/leader.

The lower tertiary Wilcox trend, which extends from Alaminos Canyon(AC) to Keathley Canyon (KC), is attracting more attention from the oil&gas industry (Vassilellis, et al., 2013) and more production and final investment decision (FID) are expected in the near future according to WoodMac latest reports. The range of reserves of the lower tertiary Wilcox trend is between 3 and 15 billion barrels (Dusterhoft, Strobel, & Szatny, 2012). Buckskin field is among the fields located in this trend at approximately 290 miles south-east of Houston (Ait-Ettajer, 2017). The Buckskin discovery well (yacimiento_golfo_mexico.aspx, 2009) and the appraisal wells drilled afterwards, encountered more than 1,000 foot hydrocarbon column between 25,000 and 27,000 feet depth and 6000 feet of water, in sand bearing turbidite, located in different compartments bounded by a complex fault network. Despite, the subsurface studies performed following the drilling campaign, significant uncertainties remained. Several approaches were assessed in order to study the impact of those uncertainties on the hydrocarbon storage and mobility of this field. Probabilistic methods based on experimental design and Monte-Carlo simulations, were chosen in order to optimize the development plan and the reserves assessment, due to their robustness and their flexibility. Those probabilistic methods, combined with experimental design technique, allowed the identification of the key uncertainties and the definition of response model that predicts the range of oil in place and the optimization of the development plans, without the need to run hundreds of thousands realizations.

The Challenge Program on Water and Food pursues food security and poverty alleviation through the efforts of some 50 research-for-development projects. These involve almost 200 organizations working in nine river basins around the world. An approach was developed to enhance the developmental impact of the program through better impact assessment, to provide a framework for monitoring and evaluation, to permit stakeholders to derive strategic and programmatic lessons for future initiatives, and to provide information that can be used to inform public awareness efforts. The approach makes explicit a project’s program theory by describing its impact pathways in terms of a logic model and network maps. A narrative combines the logic model and the network maps into a single explanatory account and adds to overall plausibility by explaining the steps in the logic model and the key risks and assumptions. Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis is based on concepts related to program theory drawn from the fields of evaluation, organizational learning, and social network analysis.