Hello, AEA365 readers! We are S. Nanthikesan (International Evaluation Academy), E. Jane Davidson (Real Evaluation & Footprint Evaluation Initiative), and Juha I. Uitto (International Development Evaluation Association & Environmental Law Institute). Between us, we have nearly a century of evaluation experience across diverse sectors and international contexts. Our forthcoming JMDE article poses a hard question: Are evaluations actually helping drive the transformational change the polycrisis demands — or are they reinforcing business as usual?
Most evaluations still measure incremental progress within existing systems. That works for routine programming, but it risks transformation-washing: labeling any positive result “transformational” even when it is a modest tweak to the status quo. Distributing drought-tolerant seeds helps farmers in an incremental way; overhauling water governance, insurance markets, and extension services to make rural communities genuinely resilient is transformational.
Hot Tip #1:
Use six characteristics to spot transformational interventions. Synthesizing frameworks from major climate funds (CIF, GCF, GEF) and development organizations (IFAD, UNDP), we distilled six markers: paradigm shift, systemic influence over rules and incentives, scale and diffusion beyond project boundaries, durability beyond the funding cycle, equity addressing the root causes of vulnerability, and win-win outcomes across socioeconomic, ecosystem, and climate dimensions. No single intervention embodies all six — transformational is built from many interacting “building blocks.”
Hot Tip #2:
Evaluate the nexus, not just the intervention. Move away from anthropocentric evaluation, which treats nature as a resource rather than a system to sustain. Our nexus approach assesses interactions among three domains simultaneously — human systems, ecosystems, and climate — because gains in one can undermine or reinforce gains in another. Transformational changes are durable because they identify these mutually reinforcing gains.
Hot Tip #3:
Use a rubric to assess nexus effects. Drawing on the Footprint Evaluation Initiative’s typology, evaluators can rate interventions along a spectrum from “ignores natural systems” to “restorative” without pretending that false precision is possible across wildly different ecosystems. The same logic applies to social equity, allowing evaluators to plot interventions on an Equity–Sustainability Matrix that makes trade-offs between human and natural systems, or genuine win-wins, visible at a glance.
Lesson Learned: Current methods miss actual harm.
A thematic review of 30 IFAD-supported climate adaptation projects across 20 countries, reassessed through the nexus lens, found that most agricultural projects were still causing some harm to natural systems — harm that was invisible in their original project-level evaluations.
Lesson Learned: Evidence alone doesn’t move decision-makers.
Institutional inertia, short political cycles, vested interests, and cognitive resistance all block the uptake of good evidence. Evaluators need to generate evidence that speaks directly to these barriers: farmer-led transition case studies, comparative rubric-guided assessments across contexts, and visual tools such as the Equity-Sustainability Matrix that challenge the assumption that people and the planet are locked in a zero-sum game (in which gains for one are always at the expense of the other).
Our call to the evaluation community: Ask whether results are genuinely transformational, not merely positive; examine nexus effects even in the absence of an explicit environmental or equity mandate; and think systemically about where a project fits within a broader change effort. Climate and environmental breakdown is not a niche specialization — alongside equity, it is the other defining challenge of our era, and evaluation has a real stake in addressing both issues clearly.
Rad Reference
Nanthikesan, S., Davidson, E. J., & Uitto, J. I. (2026). Evaluating for transformational responses: Climate change, ecosystem degradation, and social inequality. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 52. (Forthcoming) https://jmde.com/
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