Melanie Punton is a senior consultant at Itad, a UK-based consultancy specialising in providing insight and ideas to drive more effective use of resources in international development through monitoring and evaluation. Melanie specialises in innovative theory based evaluation approaches, and has applied realist evaluation within the multi-year impact evaluations of the DFID-funded Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) and Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programmes. She has also co-authored practice papers on realist evaluation and process tracing, and as a member of Itad’s Knowledge Hub works to distil lessons, share insights and build capacity on theory based evaluation practice within Itad and beyond.