Sustainability‐Ready Evaluation: A Call to Action

Abstract

Abstract Evaluation is at the cusp of two urgent challenges: indigenous evaluation and sustainability. How we respond to these challenges can dramatically affect the future of evaluation. A sustainability‐ready evaluation will be transformative. It will be an evaluation that recognizes that human and natural systems are coupled, and that evaluation portfolios are now and will increasingly be affected by our connections to natural system forces including climate. Sustainability‐ready evaluation will be an evaluation that reaches well past the intervention to important public policy goals and to key sustainability challenges. Evaluating coupled human and natural systems will be challenging. Fortunately, technical barriers do not prevent us from starting to infuse sustainability into evaluation; the barriers are social and associated with the worldview and vision of evaluation. To facilitate the development of sustainability‐ready evaluation, this paper provides an initial checklist and references to useful resources. Absent transformations to become sustainability‐ready evaluation will lack relevance for many of the current and future key issues of our times. Fields lacking relevance are themselves not sustainable.

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