Relational contexts, generative mechanisms: How social network analysis can strengthen realist evaluation practice

Social network analysis and realist evaluation have largely evolved in parallel despite shared concerns with complexity, conditionality, and interdependence. This article argues that integrating them can strengthen realist practice by making relational context more empirically visible and causal explanations more precisely specified. Context is conceptualized at two levels: national political and regulatory conditions that shape interorganizational networks, and realized network structures of centrality, community configuration, and brokerage that create relational opportunities and constraints. Network positions are treated as structural conditions that may provide access to resources, not as mechanisms in themselves. Realist evaluation is then used to investigate how actors interpret and use these opportunities and what mechanisms and outcomes follow. Drawing on a policy-influencing network study in the country of Georgia, the article shows how social network analysis can strengthen realist inquiry by identifying relational opportunities and constraints within complex multi-actor systems.