The Highland Energy Community Partnership is an ambitious, complex, large-scale and long-term project that aims to overcome barriers to home decarbonisation and fuel poverty alleviation in remote areas of the Scottish Highlands.
As part of the bid development process, our Impact Evaluation Consultant, Emma Lindsay, worked with the Partnership bid team to map out a framework for the project. This ensured there was a clear relationship between the project’s themes and activities, and its overall outcomes.
Having those clear relationships at the bid stage strengthened the project’s impact claims, as it meant each outcome could be traced back to specific delivery activities. The team were successful in securing funding for the project from the National Lottery under its Climate Action Fund.
Project pre-launch
Katy Syme and Joanna Long, our Consultant and Senior Consultant, were involved in numerous activities leading up to the project launch in late October 2025.
Perhaps the most important was a workshop held in Inverness to develop a draft theory of change for the Partnership. It was invaluable to be able to connect with representatives from across the Partnership and plan how we can accelerate a fair, low-carbon future in the Highlands.
What is theory of change?
‘Theory of change’ sets out how a project is going to make change happen and helps identify the data that will need to be collected to evidence the project’s impacts.
The process of creating the theory of change is as important as the thing itself. Exploring together the pathways to impact creates a strong shared understanding across all partners and stakeholders about what we are doing and why.
For the Highland Energy Community Partnership this took the form of a day-long workshop involving representatives from all six local delivery partners, as well as the project’s supporting partners. We came together to map out the Partnership’s key impact pathways in detail and identify the conditions needed for long-term success.
Project funders such as the National Lottery hold theory of change workshops as they value groups looking at the impact of changes over the course of a project.
Developing the Highland Energy Community Partnership
The partnership is project that aims to overcome barriers to home decarbonisation and fuel poverty alleviation in remote areas of the Scottish Highlands.
Monitoring and evaluation plan
The draft theory of change was then refined with input from other Partnership members into a finalised version that will guide and support Partnership work.
In addition to the theory of change, Changeworks’ Consultancy team has developed a monitoring and evaluation plan to support delivery teams to capture relevant data in an efficient and effective way. We have also supported the development of interview questions to understand the perspectives and challenges facing current and potential suppliers of retrofit services in the Highland region.
Project delivery
Looking ahead, the Consultancy team will continue to support the Partnership by providing ongoing monitoring and evaluation support to the project delivery team.
We will also annually review and update the theory of change. This will allow the project to respond to new information and learnings using this knowledge to adapt project activities to maximise impact.
At the same time, we will be continuously learning and improving our monitoring and evaluation approach using feedback from an external evaluator. One of the conditions of the funding award for the project was that a third party be appointed to review the monitoring and evaluation every year, providing feedback on strengths and areas for improvement.
Learning and continuous improvement are the very heart of evaluation, and we welcome this external perspective on our work and the opportunity to strengthen our approach.
What participants said about the workshops
“I thought that the facilitators were excellent and explained things really well.”
“The Theory of Change lets me know what other partners value and helps me stay on the same page as everyone else.”
“The Theory of Change reinforced the idea that actions have consequences. And it was very useful to be able to really focus on certain aspects of the job.”