Good morning colleagues, and thank you for launching this very timely discussion.
I’d like to share a recent experience from the FAO Office of Evaluation where we explicitly drew on foresight principles in the design and conduct of an evaluation.
In evaluating FAO’s work on One Health, we began with a familiar retrospective lens: how did the approach evolve, and what did FAO contribute? This analysis showed a strong trajectory—leadership over 20 years, particularly in animal health, zoonotic disease control, biosecurity, and more recently antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and pandemic preparedness.
But we quickly ran into a temporal mismatch.
One Health is not a stable field. It is being reshaped by climate change, biodiversity loss, land-use pressures, AMR, and broader food system transformation. Evaluating performance against past conditions risks producing findings that are valid—but less useful for navigating what comes next.
So the question shifted: not just did FAO perform well? but is its approach fit for the futures now emerging?
That’s where a foresight lens—informally, thinking in terms of emerging risks, system shifts, and plausible futures—added value.
It helped us reinterpret a central tension. FAO’s strengths—deep expertise in animal health, strong country platforms, and operational experience—are also its path dependencies. While FAO has adopted a broader, more holistic definition of One Health, implementation still often appears animal health-centred, with ecosystem and systems dimensions less consistently integrated.
From a forward-looking perspective, this matters. Future One Health challenges are likely to be more interconnected, not less. They will require deeper integration across sectors (animals, plants, environment, food systems) and stronger cross-sectoral coordination at country level.
One takeaway for me is that foresight can enter evaluation through existing criteria:
Relevance becomes future fitness
Sustainability becomes resilience under change
Coherence becomes the ability to work across systems
Retrospective evaluation tells us how we got here. A future-informed lens helps us ask whether we’re ready for what’s next.
I’d be very interested to hear how others have approached this—have you found practical ways to bring even light-touch foresight into evaluation design or interpretation?
RE: From Hindsight to Foresight: How Evaluation Can Become Future-Informed
Italy
Carlos Tarazona
Senior Evaluation Officer
FAO
Posted on 25/03/2026
Good morning colleagues, and thank you for launching this very timely discussion.
I’d like to share a recent experience from the FAO Office of Evaluation where we explicitly drew on foresight principles in the design and conduct of an evaluation.
In evaluating FAO’s work on One Health, we began with a familiar retrospective lens: how did the approach evolve, and what did FAO contribute? This analysis showed a strong trajectory—leadership over 20 years, particularly in animal health, zoonotic disease control, biosecurity, and more recently antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and pandemic preparedness.
But we quickly ran into a temporal mismatch.
One Health is not a stable field. It is being reshaped by climate change, biodiversity loss, land-use pressures, AMR, and broader food system transformation. Evaluating performance against past conditions risks producing findings that are valid—but less useful for navigating what comes next.
So the question shifted: not just did FAO perform well? but is its approach fit for the futures now emerging?
That’s where a foresight lens—informally, thinking in terms of emerging risks, system shifts, and plausible futures—added value.
It helped us reinterpret a central tension. FAO’s strengths—deep expertise in animal health, strong country platforms, and operational experience—are also its path dependencies. While FAO has adopted a broader, more holistic definition of One Health, implementation still often appears animal health-centred, with ecosystem and systems dimensions less consistently integrated.
From a forward-looking perspective, this matters. Future One Health challenges are likely to be more interconnected, not less. They will require deeper integration across sectors (animals, plants, environment, food systems) and stronger cross-sectoral coordination at country level.
One takeaway for me is that foresight can enter evaluation through existing criteria:
Retrospective evaluation tells us how we got here. A future-informed lens helps us ask whether we’re ready for what’s next.
I’d be very interested to hear how others have approached this—have you found practical ways to bring even light-touch foresight into evaluation design or interpretation?