This article examines how evaluative practice can better support public management in an era of “polycrisis” marked by climate breakdown, ecological collapse, conflict, inequality, and democratic erosion. Governments need to manage increasing uncertainty and evaluative practice needs to be repositioned and embedded to support emergent policy and management processes. The article draws on a global futures exercise using the 3 Horizons approach with 39 respondents, combined with literature review, AI-assisted analysis, and four case studies of public sector evaluative systems in South Africa, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the City of Cape Town. Across the cases, findings show that when evaluation is reconfigured as a diverse set of embedded, collaborative practices, it can inform major spending decisions, reframe policy goals to address the polycrisis, and build institutional capability for continuous learning. The article concludes that transforming evaluation from a narrow, compliance-driven function into an agile, futures-linked, and systems-oriented diverse practice is not optional but a precondition for credible public management in the polycrisis, and calls for deliberate changes in incentives, roles, and governance arrangements to institutionalise this shift.
Artificial intelligence (AI) presents both transformational opportunities and challenges for evaluation practice in an era of interconnected global crises. This article examines how evaluators can engage AI in ways that align with the transformational imperative and decolonial commitments, rather than reproducing extractive or exclusionary practices. The central questions guiding this inquiry are: How can AI technologies be adopted within evaluation practice without reproducing colonial patterns of extraction and dominance? What essential infrastructures and competencies do evaluators need to integrate AI systems responsibly within transformational agendas? Drawing on “Made in Africa Evaluation” (MAE) and “Made in Africa AI” (MAAI) as intersecting movements, the article examines tensions between growing interest in AI and fundamental concerns about current AI systems. Environmental costs (energy and water use), extractive labour arrangements, and Western-biased datasets raise questions about alignment with transformational imperatives. The concentration of AI development within Western corporations further challenges decolonized evaluation efforts. Through a decolonial analysis of MAE and MAAI experiences, we show how these movements clarify both practical opportunities for AI-enabled evaluation and the risks of reinforcing existing power asymmetries. Together, they offer pathways toward AI adoption that centers African contexts, languages, and epistemologies while promoting equitable and sustainable evaluation practice.
Evaluation is increasingly called upon to remain relevant amid escalating social, environmental, and technological disruption and instability. Existing evaluation competency frameworks offer valuable foundations, but can be complemented by orientations that better support engagement with the transformational imperative: the urgent need for systemic, just, and regenerative change in response to the global polycrisis. Drawing on a Three Horizons foresight exercise, a targeted literature review, and practitioner experience, this article identifies a competency gap and proposes eleven competencies that bridge conventional evaluation practice and transformation-focused aspirations. These competencies extend beyond evaluators to include commissioners, managers, users, and educators. Scenario-based illustrations demonstrate how they may manifest across roles, while the 3Cs framework—competencies, capacities, and capabilities—emphasizes that their meaningful application depends on supportive institutional and systemic conditions. Rather than a prescriptive model, the competencies offer an adaptable framing to orient evaluation toward openness, reflexivity, and values-driven practice. The aim is to catalyze dialogue, experimentation, and adaptive learning across the evaluation ecosystem.
This article argues that evaluation must radically reorient to meet the transformational imperative posed by the global polycrisis. It critiques evaluation-as-usual (e.g., retrospective, technocratic, and short-term) for reinforcing the systems it purports to assess, and proposes Transformative Foresight (TF) as not merely a technical shift, but as a paradigmatic reorientation that integrates anticipatory, participatory, and decolonial practices into evaluation, moving beyond incremental improvement toward systemic transformation. The authors use three TF subtypes—Trauma-Transformative, Queer, and Indigenous Foresight—that center healing, justice, and relationality in how futures are imagined, evidenced, and governed. A mini case study supports each subtype. This approach expands validity, rigor, and evidence to include affect, stories, ritual, and futures consciousness, and cultivate H2+ niches within the Three Horizons framework. Using Causal Layered Analysis and the Twelve Principles of Transformation-Focused Evaluation as scaffolds, the article repositions evaluators as companions of systemic transition rather than neutral auditors. It concludes with suggestions for funders, evaluators, and communities. They should adopt foresight-driven, justice-oriented practices. This will help make evaluation an anticipatory, reparative, and ecological tool. Together, they can co-create diverse, regenerative futures and support intergenerational accountability.
The world is increasingly facing rapid degeneration of social and ecological systems. This requires evaluation to focus on the underlying systems rather than isolated interventions, prompting an interest in systems-informed evaluation, and evaluation that focuses on systems. This article proposes a practical conceptual framework that links widely recognized systems principles with concrete evaluation choices across the policy and evaluation lifecycle. The framework is grounded in current systems thinking and complexity literature and informed by multiple traditions in evaluation, including theory-based, participatory, and learning-oriented approaches. The article draws on literature, practitioner insights from the Three Horizons study and three real-world examples: humanitarian energy systems (RE4R), Indigenous community health systems (Healthy Families NZ), and portfolio-based municipal development (UNDP). It examines how systems principles are enacted through evaluation design, governance, methodology, analysis, validation, follow-up and use. The cross-case analysis highlights recurring features: shared ownership, attention to context and adaptive systems, and approaches that strengthen evaluative thinking. We conclude that systems-informed evaluation is less a specialist method than a practice stance, requiring intentional choices that hold complexity, share power amongst multiple stakeholders, and support ongoing learning. An agenda emerges that may be motivating for interested partners to collaborate on taking forward.
