Seasoned specialist with over twenty years of experience in the design, management and evaluation of humanitarian and development interventions. Check out my LinkedIn for more info!
Posted on 06/05/2025
Dear Colleagues,
Thanks for your contributions. It is great that many community members have experience with SSTC and have encountered the need to identify and document intangible outcomes and promote rigorous approaches to evaluate its effectiveness. I encourage other members to share their views and reflect on how these methods and practices can be included in our evaluation practices beyond SSTC.
Best,
Carlos
Italy
Carlos Tarazona
Senior Evaluation Officer
FAO
Posted on 27/03/2026
Steve, thank you for this thoughtful engagement and for bringing in Michael Quinn Patton’s work, which I also find highly relevant to this discussion.
I very much agree with your reading that a foresight lens does not necessarily require a parallel methodology, but can be embedded in how we interpret and apply existing frameworks. In that sense, your point about a “more honest application” of the DAC criteria resonates strongly with my own experience particularly in contexts like One Health, climate change adaptation, and agrifood system transformation, where systems are evolving even as we evaluate them.
At the same time, Silvia’s intervention pushes this one step further in an important way. I share the concern that if evaluation remains anchored in a compliance-oriented logic, even well-integrated foresight risks being instrumentalised used to anticipate within predefined boundaries rather than to genuinely question them. The distinction she draws between evaluation as verification versus exploration is, I think, exactly right.
In my view, however, the real constraint on integrating foresight is often not at the level of tools or criteria but much earlier, at the stage of evaluation conceptualisation.
In the FAO One Health case, the ability to incorporate a foresight perspective was enabled by an in-depth preliminary analysis and literature review conducted at the design stage. Without that early investment, it would have been significantly harder to introduce a meaningful forward-looking dimension later on. By the time questions, scope, and methods are fixed, the evaluation architecture is already path-dependent—ironically mirroring the very dynamics we are trying to assess.
So perhaps the discussion can be nuanced in three directions:
If foresight is to be more than an add-on, it needs to be designed in from the outset, not retrofitted.
This has practical implications for commissioners. If we are serious about developmental or formative approaches, foresight needs to be reflected in:
In that respect, the approach we often use at FAO, a question-driven, utilization-focused design, guided but not constrained by OECD DAC criteria does offer some flexibility. It allows us, at least in principle, to embed forward-looking dimensions early on, provided that the conceptual groundwork is strong enough.
So perhaps the challenge is not only to rethink criteria or embrace foresight tools, but also to shift attention upstream: to how evaluations are commissioned, framed, and intellectually grounded before they even begin.
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?