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?

Greetings! I am Sonal Zaveri, a gender and equity evaluator based in South Asia and on the Board of IEAc. Over the past three decades, I have worked on evaluations related to women’s empowerment, masculinities, gender-based violence, and social norms across Asia and Africa. More recently, collaborating with feminist evaluators from Latin America, South Asia, and Africa reminded me that some of my biggest professional lessons have come from questioning my own assumptions.

Hi, I’m Scott Chaplowe, an evaluation specialist and co-editor of an IEAc special issue of JMDE on Evaluation and the Transformational Imperative. This post is about why we think evaluation’s competencies need to change in response to ongoing collapse.

Good morning, AEA365 readers. We are Cristina Magro and Beverly Parsons. Before joining the evaluation field, Cristina worked as a linguist, and Beverly as a medical technologist and a physiological chemistry research assistant. Drawing on our expertise and experience in evaluation, neuroscience, language, culture, epistemology, systems thinking, and cross-cultural evaluation, we argue that the evaluation field needs profound changes to address the accelerating systemic imbalances and to fulfill its transformative role, an argument we developed in the paper ‘Revisiting evaluation as a science’, at the JMDE forthcoming publication. The fortunate conjunction of our gazes enables us to navigate situations, drawing on Scriven’s aspirational transdisciplinary model, which highlights three dimensions of evaluation: epistemological, political, and disciplinary. Our focus is on the epistemological pillar, advocating for shifts that can make evaluation more adaptive and better equipped to meet today’s challenges.

Hi, I am Steve Powell, writing for the International Evaluation Academy. As an evaluator I have mostly worked in international development; now I spend my time at Causal Map Ltd in the UK.

Hello! I am Varaidzo Magodo-Matimba, a core collaborator at The MERL Tech Initiative and the AI+ Africa Learning Group Lead, hosted by the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice. The AI+ Africa Learning group exists to create space, structure and momentum to work and learn together. We have over 700 members and our membership spans multiple sectors and we work to build relationships and connections across and within the continent, with an eye toward strengthening Majority World collaborations.

Hello! I am Rajib Nandi, a researcher and evaluator working primarily in South Asia, with a focus on evaluation capacity development. Here, I reflect on the evaluation competencies of emotional intelligence and resilience. I have identified these within a core set of eleven competencies in the forthcoming article ‘Rethinking Evaluation Competencies for the Transformational Imperative,’ part of a special issue of the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation (JMDE) led by the International Evaluation Academy (IEAc)