Thank you, Alexis, for your contribution. The example you raise…costly infrastructure rendered ineffective or destroyed by extreme climate events….puts the attribution problem in very concrete terms. It is a scenario that exposes a fundamental limitation of the logic model at the heart of most retrospective evaluation. If the causal chain is severed by an external shock, the evaluation framework itself struggles to make sense of what happened, let alone offer useful guidance for what should come next.
This connects to a broader issue in evaluation methodology, which is that our standard frameworks often assume a degree of stability in the operating environment that increasingly does not hold in climate-affected contexts. Integrated landscape management is a particularly interesting domain here, because it already operates with long time horizons and complex systems, which arguably makes it one of the areas where foresight-informed evaluation is not a luxury but a necessity. I am curious whether you have seen attempts to build scenario-based thinking into evaluation design in the contexts where you work, even informally, and whether those efforts have helped evaluators and stakeholders navigate the attribution challenges you describe
RE: From Hindsight to Foresight: How Evaluation Can Become Future-Informed
Kenya
Steven Lynn Lichty
Managing Partner
REAL Consulting Group
Posted on 27/03/2026
Thank you, Alexis, for your contribution. The example you raise…costly infrastructure rendered ineffective or destroyed by extreme climate events….puts the attribution problem in very concrete terms. It is a scenario that exposes a fundamental limitation of the logic model at the heart of most retrospective evaluation. If the causal chain is severed by an external shock, the evaluation framework itself struggles to make sense of what happened, let alone offer useful guidance for what should come next.
This connects to a broader issue in evaluation methodology, which is that our standard frameworks often assume a degree of stability in the operating environment that increasingly does not hold in climate-affected contexts. Integrated landscape management is a particularly interesting domain here, because it already operates with long time horizons and complex systems, which arguably makes it one of the areas where foresight-informed evaluation is not a luxury but a necessity. I am curious whether you have seen attempts to build scenario-based thinking into evaluation design in the contexts where you work, even informally, and whether those efforts have helped evaluators and stakeholders navigate the attribution challenges you describe