Systemic Impact: A New Era of Evaluation

Abstract Information: A global polycrisis marked by urgent challenges such as environmental degradation, social injustice, and economic instability, calls for transformation of entire systems and adoption of approaches that go beyond silos and linear thinking. This imperative is accompanied by a concurrent call for the transformation of evaluation practice towards more systemic and complexity-aware approaches. The active engagement and inclusion of young and emerging voices from historically marginalized communities are pivotal not only for driving meaningful transformative change in systems, but also for effectively evaluating such changes. How can we disrupt conventional narratives and reshape evaluation frameworks to consciously consider systems as a lever to lasting impact? Welthungerhilfe (WHH) argues that a non-systemic understanding of impact is no longer appropriate and proposes six attributes that characterize impact. Their incorporation in impact definitions frames the ability to measure systemic changes and identify impacts on systems as such - a precondition for scaling positive impact in a sustainable manner. How can we measure and quantify systems-level impact? Acknowledging that conventional, direct program implementation will not meet the world’s urgent needs, CARE recognizes the need for structural change to achieve impact at scale. We will share our measurement framework and practical, real world examples of how we’ve measured systems-level change in different countries around the world. How can we see, understand, and learn from our efforts to contribute to sustainably addressing the injustices of poverty and humanitarian crises? Oxfam has adopted a systems change focus and has grappled with the challenge of how to “measure” contribution to systems change. We are experimenting with a learning-centric approach to evaluation at the organizational level that employs a framework encompassing levers of change across the levels of systems change. We will share our efforts to design this approach and our experience with it to date and where we are in testing our new approach. What conditions are needed to conduct systemic evaluations across different audiences of donors, commissioners, organizations, and practitioners? An independent consultant’s perspective draws on her experience in indigenous indigenous and health system evaluations to highlight the essential preconditions necessary for the effective execution of systemic evaluation. Collectively, this conversation will highlight how different international NGOs and evaluation practitioners are conceptualizing and measuring systems-level change and systems-level impact. This session presents an all-women panel of members and leaders from the African Evaluation Association, American Evaluation Association, and European Evaluation Society, and to advance the consideration of systemic impact in evaluation. This session includes voices of the Global South and young evaluators, and is structured as a dynamic, interactive dialogue among the panelists and the participants. It aims to challenge conventional thinking with new conceptual models and showcase practical innovative case studies from the real-world.