Date: Saturday, April 25, 2026
Hi there! I’m Taylor B. Anderson, a Senior Consultant at Public Profit. At AEA 2025, I co-facilitated a pre-conference workshop with Annette L. Gardner, Rhonda Schlangen, and Kathleen Sullivan on foresight methods for evaluators. Earlier that year, Annette and Rhonda wrote a terrific AEA365 post making the case for combining foresight and evaluation. Here, I build upon that work to answer the question:
Why are futures and foresight especially urgent for environmental evaluators?
As Annette and Rhonda noted, evaluators are strong at looking backward and making sense retrospectively. However, we often miss testing our recommendations against different possible and plausible futures. This leaves us trying to shape futures while only looking at the past.
Futures and foresight are natural, necessary next steps for systems thinkers and systems change evaluators, many whom also consider the environment in their work. Foresight helps us explore how connections between contextual factors might shift over time.
In the environmental and climate space, policy windows shift rapidly, ecosystems cross irreversible thresholds, and the communities we work with face compounding risks. Our retrospective datasets can’t anticipate these changes. When we evaluate environmental initiatives without scanning on a longer-term horizon for emerging trends and weak signals, our recommendations and strategies can cause harm and fail.
Futures thinking about the land, water, and other earth relatives is not new. We must recognize Indigenous knowledge as foundational to a futures practice and ground our work in that deeper wisdom and accountability.
For example, the Seventh Generation Principle is rooted in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy – an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of Native Americans and First Nations peoples in northeast North America – and echoed across Indigenous cultures globally. The principle calls on decision holders to consider the impact of their choices seven generations ahead. This challenges the short-term focus of quarterly reports, election cycles, and many of our evaluation timelines.
Futures and foresight are most powerful when it’s participatory, inclusive, and reflective of diverse perspectives. Foresight methods should invite communities to envision their own preferred futures rather than having futures imposed on them by funders or other external partners.
In environmental projects, the most affected communities are often least represented in planning and decision making. We must center frontline communities in our approach to best prepare for and navigate all possible futures.
Annette and Rhonda’s AEA365 post pointed to excellent foundational foresight resources. To go deeper on the climate angle, I’d add a piece from Alliance Magazine, Strategic foresight: A powerful tool for climate philanthropy by Claire Bulger and Laurence Tubiana. They argue that climate initiatives require planning on a ten-year horizon. And for examples of joyous and provocative climate futures, seek out Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right?, a collection of essays, interviews, data, and art.
The climate crisis is happening now, but its worst consequences and the best innovations to address it are still ahead. If evaluation is going to be relevant to solving it, we need to become as skilled at looking forward as we are at looking back.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Environmental Program Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Environmental Program Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our EPE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.