Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, “Evaluation and the Transformational Imperative.” Issued on 2026

Illustrative Abstract:

A decade into the UN’s 2030 Agenda, “transformation” has become a buzzword in development discourse even as the gap between its rhetoric and its practice widens. This special issue of the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, “Evaluation and the Transformational Imperative,” developed with the International Evaluation Academy (IEAc), takes up the transformational imperative (the urgent need for fundamental, systemic change to address the complex, interrelated global challenges of our times) and argues that evaluation cannot help meet it without first transforming itself.

Grounded in the IEAc’s Three Horizons foresight exercise, the special issue brings together 15 articles written by over 65 authors that interrogate evaluation’s assumptions, methods, and relationship to power in the face of an intensifying polycrisis composed of converging ecological, social, economic, and technological crises. Contributors move from the epistemological (challenging evaluation’s claims to neutrality and linear causality) to the practical (systems thinking, foresight, AI, gender, Indigenous and Global South frameworks, and the evaluation marketplace itself), converging on a shared argument: transformation is not incremental improvement or reform within existing systems, but a fundamental shift in values, mindsets, structures, and relationships.

Authored by a deliberately diverse international team of evaluators, commissioners, and scholars, the special issue extends its lens beyond evaluators to the broader ecosystem in which evaluation is embedded. This encompasses funders, policymakers, educators, and communities who participate in, shape, use, and are affected by evaluative practice. It does not offer a blueprint solution, but an invitation to reckon with evaluation’s role in either sustaining business-as-usual or contributing meaningfully to just, equitable, and regenerative futures.