The panel continues our consideration on how transformations practitioners design, manage, and facilitate transformations initiatives, with a focus on highly engaged evaluation practices. Adam Hejnowicz will begin by exploring how evaluation must play a central role in driving and shaping transformative change, and how urgent adjustments are needed for evaluation to become an integral part of transformational efforts. This is followed by Louis Klein and Karima Kadaui, who will take a close look at a multi-year assessment process that is underway for the Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development in Morocco. Michael Quinn Patton will provide his reflections on the previous two presentations and facilitate a discussion with the panel, integrating ideas from his work with Blue Marble Assessment, developmental evaluation, and utilization-focused evaluation. The remainder of the session will include panel discussion, breakouts, and harvesting collective ideas about moving forward.
Speakers: Adam Hejnowicz, Karima Kadaoui, Louis Klein, Michael Quinn Patton
Presentations:
Evaluation for transformation: Pathways to mobilize transformational change for sustainable development
Adam HejnowiczBusiness as usual is no longer a viable option. The climate and biodiversity crises are tangible and immanent and represent existential threats to current and future generations (IPBES, 2019; IPCC 2021). While the CoVID-19 pandemic further illuminated the frailties and failures of the planetary system (Diffenbaugh et al., 2020), and the war in Ukraine has reignited geopolitical divides and exposed the fragilities of global energy and food supply chains (UN, 2022). We must explore better alternatives and welcome new ways of addressing sustainable development challenges. Radical, transformational change is needed based on new values and patterns of thinking, experimenting, learning, and adapting – decoupling economic advancement from environmental degradation, reducing social and gender inequalities, and finding solutions that are more custom fit for a specific context (UN, 2019).Transformational processes are important in the design, implementation and evaluation of the sustainable development goal (SDG) (Sterner et al., 2019). Here, scientist and practitioner communities spanning natural, social, and human sciences must work together, and with policy actors, to help develop the tractable solutions that our collective societies and ecosystems require. The intersection between evaluation and transformation, though emergent, has received insufficient attention. Here we argue that the field of evaluation can be – and even has to be – central to efforts to accelerate progress towards the transformational changes the world needs now. This places on evaluation specialists the responsibility to rethink how their praxis can be shaped to be of most value for this purpose (Ofir and Rugg, 2021). We highlight the current role and contributions of evaluation practice in efforts to engineer or orchestrate desirable systems transformations, exploring whether evaluation itself can be transformational, before proposing how the field of evaluation may have to adjust with a sense of urgency to become an integral, recognized part of such effortsTamkeen Community Foundation Systems Assessment
Karima Kadaoui, Louis KleinA close look at a multi-year assessment process that is underway for the Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development in Morocco.