Background and Rationale
Food security, environmental, and agricultural development programmes increasingly operate in volatile, uncertain, and complex contexts. Climate disruption, ecosystem degradation, shifting geopolitical conditions, and cascading crises are no longer background noise. They shape the environment in which these programmes are designed and implemented. Evaluation in these sectors often stays focused on retrospective accountability, measuring past performance against fixed objectives, even as operating conditions keep shifting.
This temporal mismatch has practical consequences. When evaluations judge relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability against the conditions that existed at programme design, they can produce findings that are accurate about the past but less useful for guiding future decisions and navigating change. Theory of Change processes often mirror the same limitation one that does not account for the plausible futures that will determine whether current investments ultimately succeed or fail.
Strategic foresight brings forward-looking approaches that can strengthen evaluation practice. Methods such as horizon scanning, scenario planning, Futures Triangle, the Three Horizons framework, and Causal Layered Analysis help evaluators look beyond past performance and consider how programmes might perform under different future conditions. These foresight tools and frameworks can enrich evaluation at every stage, from scoping and design through to learning and use. When used alongside evaluation, they support more anticipatory governance, enabling decisions that draw on evidence, while remaining attentive to uncertainty and long-term change.
Momentum for integrating foresight and evaluation is already visible across various sectors. WFP's Anticipatory Action programmes, for example, have already introduced foresight-informed approaches into monitoring and evaluation frameworks. At the same time, organisations such as the GEF, CGIAR, and FAO are exploring how evaluation can better assess long-term resilience and systemic impacts in environment and agriculture investments. These developments are also prompting broader reflection within the evaluation community, including renewed interest in how the OECD-DAC criteria might evolve, shifting from measuring alignment with past priorities, toward assessing prospective relevance and robustness across plausible future scenarios. Despite this momentum, practical guidance for evaluators remains limited. Few evaluators have received formal exposure to foresight methods, and foresight practitioners are rarely trained in evaluation. The tools, case examples, and community of practice needed to connect these fields are not yet well established.
Discussion Purpose
This online discussion will examine how foresight methods can be integrated into evaluation practice in food security, environmental, and agricultural contexts. Drawing on practitioners’ experiences, real-world examples, and optional readings, the discussion will highlight practical insights that evaluators can use to make their work responsive to uncertainty and more useful for forward-looking decision-making.
Discussion Objectives
- To introduce key foresight concepts and tools including horizon scanning, scenario planning, Causal Layered Analysis, and the Three Horizons framework and explore how they can be applied within evaluation processes.
- To examine how foresight-informed evaluation can strengthen assessments of relevance, sustainability, and systemic impact in food security, environmental, and agricultural programmes.
- To share concrete examples of foresight and evaluation integration from across the sector, including anticipatory action, climate resilience programming, and theory of change processes.
- To identify practical entry points for evaluators to begin incorporating foresight perspectives into their work, regardless of institutional context or resource constraints.
Guiding Questions
- In contexts of climate uncertainty, rapid environmental change, and shifting geopolitical realities, where have you seen the limits of retrospective evaluation? How has this affected the use of findings?
- What foresight tools or methods have you encountered in your evaluation practice? What made them useful or difficult to apply? What foresight tools, if any, have you used personally?
- How might our interpretations of the DAC criteria (such as relevance and sustainability) through a foresight lens change what we measure, how we measure, and how we make recommendations?
- Where do you see opportunities for integrating foresight and evaluation in food security, environmental, and agricultural contexts?
- What skills, resources, and institutional changes would be needed to make foresight a regular part of evaluation design and commissioning?
Discussion Readings
Week 1: Introductory discussion on the theme and exploration of the guiding questions.
Week 2: Explore Quality Criteria for Food Systems Foresight in Africa: A practitioner’s guide for commissioning, facilitating and evaluating foresight, a recent guide written by Katindi Sivi and launched by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, in partnership with Foresight4Food, University of Oxford, and the International Development Research Centre.
Week 3: Discuss “Fusing foresight and futures thinking for a new transformative evaluation paradigm” by Rose Thompson Coon, Katri Vataja, and Pinja Parkkonen (in New Directions for Evaluation, Summer 2024, Issue 183, pages 91-101)
Week 4: Examine transformative foresight for the transformational imperative, via a forthcoming article in the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, edited by Scott Chaplowe.
The online discussion will remain open for contributions until 27 April 2026!