International development specialist with 11 years of work experience in evaluation, economic research, and policy advisory in development and humanitarian contexts.
• Evaluation and research: Conducted / managed multiple evaluations for UNDP, the European Commission, and the World Bank/GEF. Designed and managed award-winning programme evaluations across 40+ vulnerable countries for UNCDF, pioneering the agency's first-ever RCT. Led and conducted research for the UN Secretariat, achieving major media coverage (The New York Times, The Washington Post).
• Capacity building and training: Developed guidance, tools, resources for UNDP and the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) to support evaluation functions globally. Delivered training for national officials and UN country teams in 10+ countries (West Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean) on methods, result frameworks, data collection;
• Comprehensive data collection efforts: Coordinated fieldwork in diverse and challenging settings (Western and Central Africa, Southern Africa, South Asia) overseeing collection, cleaning, processing, and analysis of large datasets.
Solid knowledge of economic development, research design, quantitative and mixed methods (PhD Fellow, UNU-MERIT), economics and public policy (MSc, Bocconi University). Passionate about capturing, analyzing, and sharing data-driven insights to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.
Lebanon
Pietro Tornese
Posted on 14/05/2025
Dear colleagues, thank you for starting this important and necessary discussion. A perspective I'd like to add from my experience in evaluating complex interventions with diverse, non-traditional stakeholders, which I argue can be very relevant for SSTC evaluations, is the importance of shifting towards adaptive evaluation management approaches. Adaptive evaluation management transforms evaluation from a retrospective exercise into an ongoing, live dialogue. As witnessed during evaluating development interventions in LDCs, adaptive designs help national governments, CSOs, and local networks all see their insights acted upon immediately, strengthening ownership, trust, and relevance. Briefly, three points:
(1) SSTC interventions routinely involve diverse stakeholders - local communities, national ministries, regional knowledge networks, and multiple international partners. Each level brings its own pace, priorities, and risks. A static evaluation design, with fixed frameworks and rigid timelines and data-collection plans can miss emerging issues. Adaptive evaluation instead constantly scans the context, identifies red flags and bright spots, and recalibrates both evaluation questions and data collection methods accordingly.
(2) SSTC interventions more often than not generate unexpected spillover effects, in terms of new partnerships, new networks, policy changes, stakeholder engagement… that only surface mid-way. Adaptive management can track and map these ripples in near real time. Especially at a historical time where donors demand solid evidence, adaptive evaluation helps build that evidence incrementally, responding to new data and refining attribution claims.
(3) Perhaps more importantly, adaptive evaluations in SSTC can accelerate knowledge transfer and strengthen Southern evaluation capacities, since Southern partners move from passive data providers to active evaluators, becoming more equipped to lead future evaluation processes in their own contexts.