Date: Friday, April 24, 2026
Hi! I’m Scott Chaplowe. For Earth Day I am providing a sneak peek of our forthcoming article, “Rethinking Evaluation Competencies for the Transformational Imperative,” co-authored with Candice Morkel, Thania de la Garza, Sam Buckton, Silva Ferretti, Rajib Nandi, and Sonal Zaveri. It will appear in a special issue of the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation (JMDE) hosted by the International Evaluation Academy (IEAc) titled Evaluation and the Transformational Imperative. The issue explores how evaluation can respond to the transformational imperative: the urgent need to navigate a polycrisis of compounding disruptions and systemic uncertainties that defy traditional, single-crisis solutions.
But why revisit competencies now? Because we need to prepare the next generation of evaluators to handle this reality. We must move beyond “business-as-usual” technical skills for everyone involved in the evaluation ecosystem—including those who commission, manage, use, and build capacity for evaluation. Using a Three Horizons foresight exercise conducted by IEAc, we identified competency gaps where the current state of practice is unfit for this era of discontinuity.
A diverse author team reflecting different geographies, generations, and cultures supported synthesis that drew upon multiple ways of knowing shaped by diverse evaluative contexts and experience. In the article, we propose eleven competencies to meet the moment, ranging from Transformational Values Alignment and Emotional Intelligence to Digital Stewardship and Futures Orientation. Below, in honor of Earth Day, I share the fourth competency: a call to stop treating the environment as an “externality” and start treating it as the foundation of all life.
This competency refers to the ability to frame and conduct evaluations that recognize the deep interdependence of human and natural systems, integrating environmental sustainability, ecological justice, and the inherent rights of nature into evaluative thinking and practice. Ecosystem integrity is foundational to human well-being. The accelerating degradation of natural systems (through climate change, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, pollution, and unsustainable resource extraction) threatens not only development goals but the very conditions of life itself.
This requires shifting from human-centered models to those that acknowledge Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS), where feedback loops and co-dependencies shape both resilience and vulnerability. Indigenous knowledge systems, spiritual traditions, and other ethical worldviews affirm nature’s intrinsic value—honoring it as sacred, sentient, and deserving of reciprocity not for its utility, but for what it inherently is. Yet industrial systems treat billions of sentient animals as production units, despite compelling evidence of their capacity to suffer, underscoring the need for ethical and justice-oriented evaluation.
Environmental degradation is inseparable from inequality. Wealthier populations disproportionately cause ecological harm, while the most vulnerable bear the consequences. Evaluation must account for these dynamics and support socio-ecological resilience and intergenerational justice. Environmental sustainability can be integrated at multiple entry points, including in a theory of change, stakeholder framing, design, and criteria. For example, this could be achieved by reconsidering the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Development Assistance Committee sustainability criterion to better reflect systems interdependence, or introducing frameworks like Rights of Nature to surface alternative moral paradigms.
Stay tuned for the JMDE special issue planned for April or May, and join colleagues worldwide in endorsing the Earth Day Evaluation Declaration—a joint call to action by the Global Environment Facility Independent Evalaution Office, International Development Evalaution Association (IDEAS), and the IEAc to include sustainability criteria in all evaluations.
Also follow the ecologically-focused evaluation work of Blue Marble Evaluation, Eval4Earth, and Footprint Evaluation.
Foremost, we have much to learn from Indigenous evaluation, such as EvalIndigenous, which champions nature as a central relative in our global systems.
Created for the first Earth Day celebration at Tunghai University (Taiwan) in 1991 that colleagues and I coordinated – the tree’s roots form the Chinese characters for Ecology (??).
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