[2020] Blue Marble Evaluation
description
Transforming evaluation for evaluating transformation examines the contributions that evaluation can make to addressing crises like the coronavirus pandemic, the global climate emergency, and related threats to human survival looming large in Earth’s future.
Humankind has moved into a new epoch called the Anthropocene: The era of human impact on the future of the Earth. The stability, sustainability, and resilience of the Earth’s systems, both natural and human, are now at risk due to cumulative negative human actions. Two conclusions characterize our times:
- Humanity’s use of the Earth’s resources for both production and consumption is unsustainable.
- Transformation globally is urgently required to avoid catastrophe.
The Coronavirus Pandemic has provided a glimpse into the magnitude of changes set in motion by a global emergency. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (2020), among many others, has warned consistently throughout the pandemic that climate change looms over the world as a larger, more far-reaching global emergency for which Covid-19 has been but a dress rehearsal, an early warning of what lies ahead at greater magnitude though slower manifestation.
The UN Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change issued in 2018 identifies the year 2030 as roughly the time when global warming reaches an irreversible tipping point. These conclusions about the scope and nature of humanity’s global emergencies has led to calls for urgent and major global systems transformation..
This course will examine the evidence for these conclusions and the implications for evaluation.
The question this course addresses is how to evaluate global systems transformation. This applies beyond climate change mitigation and the global pandemic to related problems of food security, agricultural transformation, equity issues, governance transformations, and the connections between local and global changes. The premise is that evaluation must be transformed if it is to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Traditional project and program evaluation will not suffice to address transformational systems changes across sectors on a global scale. Indeed, traditional approaches to project and program evaluation can create barriers to transformative change.
We shall look at examples of transformative initiatives and their evaluations, or lack thereof. In so doing, we will distinguish a theory of transformation from a theory of change. The course will offer principles for global systems transformation as a framework for assessing the likely adequacy of an initiative or intervention to be transformative. Simply monitoring progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is not transformative. The course will also offer six specific criteria for evaluating transformation in contrast to the generic DAC criteria.
Given that transformational changes are multi-faceted and occur in complex dynamic systems, traditional evaluation concerns about attribution, effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability have to be reframed. For example, systems transformation is different from program outcomes — different in the degree of change, the nature of change, the pace of change, the direction of change, the scale of change, the interconnectedness of change, and the implications for sustainability and systems resilience.
Evaluating transformation requires new ways of conceptualizing and conducting evaluations. That is the focus of the course. The course will use excerpts from Patton’s new book on Blue Marble Evaluation for Global Systems Transformation.
objectives
The participants will
- Know what the Anthropocene Epoch is that humanity is now in and the implications for design and evaluation of transformative initiatives and interventions.
- Learn the dimensions of a theory of transformation, how it is different from a theory of change, and the evaluation implications of the differences.
- Learn and be able to apply six criteria for evaluating transformational initiatives
- Become skilled in designing evaluations of transformations based on four core principles of global systems change evaluation.
recommended for
Those concerned about addressing transformational change in the face of the global crises brought on by climate change and related threats to the survival of humanity whether they be evaluators, designers of transformative interventions, policy makers concerned about the future, researchers studying global trends, funders of transformative initiatives and evaluation of those initiatives, or students desiring to prepare for the sustainability challenges of the future.
level
Participants at any level of expertise are welcome. It is not a technical course requiring advanced knowledge. Anyone can grasp the principles and practices covered in the course.
prerequisites
None.
