Evaluation, Ahead of Print.
Health committees link formalised health services and the community. However, ‘how, why, and for whom’ health committees work warrants further exploration. This article presents the development of a middle-range theory for how health committees work for building community capacity for health. Resulting programme theories from a realist evaluation in Uganda were synthesised for demi-regularities and supplemented by four key informant interviews – substantive theories were used to help explain the findings from the case studies to develop the final middle-range theories. Eighteen existing programme theories and 47 supporting context-mechanism-outcome configurations were synthesised into four middle-range theories for how health committees work for community capacity building for health at the individual, organisational, community and societal levels. The middle-range theories developed in this study provide important insight for those implementing health committees. Given the little guidance available for developing and refining middle-range theories, this study provides transparent methodological processes, which may assist future research.