Evaluators in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In the last century, human-led activities have drastically altered natural systems. The environmental impacts of human activity are so deleterious to living species and our biosphere that geologists have named this new geological era the Anthropocene, from anthropos, human being. Responses to the Anthropocene era call for drastic changes in all domains of activity. As evaluators, we claim to work for social betterment. We have a responsibility to adapt our approaches and practices to respond to this environmental challenge. The aim of this article is to raise awareness on the need to develop new approaches for evaluators in the Anthropocene. We first describe what this state of urgency represents for humans, the international commitments to take action, the solutions that exist, and what responding to this environmental challenge means for our profession.

Keywords

Anthropocene approaches ecological transition evaluation evaluators profession

Evaluation is fundamentally about values. Over and above their central role in our professional work, values are core to defining evaluators’ identity. They are evaluation’s etymological roots and contribute to defining our mission: social betterment.

As stated by Mark et al. (2000),

Evaluation assists sensemaking about policies and programs through the conduct of systematic inquiry that describes and explains the policies’ and programs’ operations, effects, justifications, and social implications. The ultimate goal of evaluation is social betterment, to which evaluation can contribute by assisting democratic institutions to better select, oversee, improve, and make sense of social programs and policies. (p. 3)

As professionals, we appraise, assess, value, judge. Our profession gives us the symbolic power to decide what is good and desirable and what is not. Over the years, we have enriched and fine-tuned our approaches and methods. The historical debates in our discipline have influenced not only evaluation practice, but also theory and practice in other fields.

Today we are at a turning point. Unless we revise our values and practices in the near term, our goal of working for social betterment will increasingly be out of reach. Why? For the simple reason that the world we live in is rapidly changing in ways that challenge our discipline’s theory and practice. We are entering in the Anthropocene era. We have not adapted our practices to this new context.

This position paper aims at raising awareness in our field on the need to profoundly revise our approaches in evaluation. It is also a call to encourage evaluators to contribute to our field in exploring and proposing approaches and practices that would reconcile natural and human systems with an overall goal of sustainability. We hope this article will foster future discussions and contributions to frame our theory and practice in this Anthropocene era.

The Anthropocene era

Over the past century, human-led activities have drastically altered natural systems, resulting in climate change, increased pollution, biodiversity loss, extinction of fish stocks, depletion of bird and insect populations, and other ecological degradation (Pauly, 2009; Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019; United Nations, 2019; Whitmee et al., 2015).

The environmental impacts of human activity are so deleterious to living species and to our biosphere that geologists have named this new geological era the Anthropocene, from anthropos, human being. The Anthropocene is marked by intensive uses of natural resources (IPCC, 2018). Among others, we note exponential increases in energy and water uses, in land domestication and forest loss, and deterioration of monitored fish schools at or beyond reproduction levels (Watts et al., 2018). Human activity is causing increased carbon dioxide emissions, rising temperatures, water shortages, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity, all of which affect elements (air, water, soil) and life (plants and animals) (Watts et al., 2015, 2018). These impacts have important and very complex consequences for determinants of human health and our capacity to preserve life and build our societies.

Ecological degradation increasingly jeopardizes human health and survival (Haines et al., 2014; Neira, 2014; Watts et al., 2015). For example, greenhouse gas emissions are now associated with tens of thousands of avoidable deaths worldwide, and pollution—mainly air pollution—has become the main cause of death worldwide (Zhang et al., 2017), responsible for 7 million deaths annually (Cheng and Berry, 2013; Woodcock et al., 2009; World Health Organization (WHO), 2018). The Commission’s report on health and climate highlights that projected climate change is threatening gains in global and development health over the last 50 years (Watts et al., 2015). Climate change increases pressure on land and ecosystems, and creates increasing risks to health, livelihoods, biodiversity, food systems and security, water supply, human security, infrastructure, and economic growth (IPCC, 2018, 2019). Several determinants of human health are impacted, with major consequences on population mental and physical health. According to the Lancet Commission on health and climate change, the greatest threat to human health is posed by climate change, which is only one aspect of our current global situation in the Anthropocene (Watts et al., 2015).

Environmental imbalances and depletion also increase social inequities, because those who are disproportionately affected by flooding, heatwaves, extreme cold, and the sanitary impacts of air pollution also have less capacity to adapt to environmental and health risks (Cutter, 2006; Douglas et al., 2012; Nicholas et al., 2015). The populations most at risk of harmful consequences from climate change events are the most disadvantaged and vulnerable, and those living in arctic ecosystems, drylands, small islands, and least developed countries (IPCC, 2018). In Canada, the most affected are “those living closest to the land” (Baier and Brown, 2019: 198), many of whom are farmers and Indigenous communities in coastal and remote communities. The IPCC (2018) also warns that “poverty and disadvantage are expected to increase in some populations as global warming increases” (p. 9). When considering environmental impacts, it is not enough to assess their consequences in particular political jurisdictions. We have to understand what they mean for other populations in other parts of the world. Scientists expect an increase in violent conflicts as the effects of climate change force population migrations—a process that has already begun.

International statements

There is a sizable and growing body of published research and international reports on the human footprint on Earth, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. All are aimed at raising awareness and at calling for action.

On the issue of climate change—which, again, is just one piece in the larger picture of environmental sustainability—there is currently a worldwide movement calling for urgent action. Several organizations have published landmark statements or reports: the IPCC (2018, 2019), the Open Working Group of the General Assembly on Sustainable Development Goals (2014), the World Bank (2016; Fay et al., 2015), the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the Pope, and 60 Nobel Prize recipients at the Mainau Declaration, among others.

With regard to climate change, in 2015, 194 States and the European Union ratified the Paris agreement (United Nations, 2015).

Article 2 of that agreement states the following:

This Agreement, in enhancing the implementation of the Convention, including its objective, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, including by:

(a) Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change. . . (United Nations, 2015: 3)

Article 4 further stipulates that

In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty. (United Nations, 2015: 3)

This international mobilization is a serious signal that we need to address this challenge.

Solutions exist

There are avenues to reconcile and harmonize human and natural systems to build planetary health (Whitmee et al., 2015). The quandary of environmental sustainability—which encompasses climate change—is not unsolvable. Many solutions exist in technological, social, economic, and legal systems, and there are many pragmatic alternatives to our current mode of organization (Alexander, 2015a; Sinaï, 2013). These include, among others, divesting resource exploitation sectors (oil, mining, commercial fishing), implementing alternative measures to GDP to measure collective wealth, modifying urban habitats, fostering permaculture, developing active and collective transportation systems, advocating reuse and condemning planned obsolescence, rethinking employment (reorganization of work), strengthening local economies, supporting the development of local currencies to encourage sustainable consumption, transforming energy supply, industries, buildings, and food consumption, among others (Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maitrise de l’Energie (ADEME) 2016; Bihouix 2016; Bourg et al., 2016; Falk et al., 2019; Pauly, 2009; Plihon, 2016).

An international research project, the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene project (Bennett et al., 2016), has recently identified 100 initiatives that affect, among others, transport, food and agriculture, town planning, economy, and citizen participation. These solutions involve both adaptation, to increase the resilience of communities and improve their response to new climatic events, and mitigation, to reduce the ecological impact of our actions (Watkiss et al., 2015). The magnitude of change needed requires transformation (Falk et al., 2019; Olsson et al., 2014; Polanyi, 2001). Given our considerable technological progress and advances in our knowledge of solutions to minimize the human footprint, the challenge is much more social and political than technical (Alexander, 2015a; Avelino, 2017; Avelino et al., 2016; Commissariat Général au développement durable, 2017).

Solutions can be implemented at different levels—individual, local, societal, and international—and generally benefit both human health and social well-being.

At the individual level, this involves revising our modes of living, how we eat (local rather than imported foods, vegetal sources of protein rather than meat or fish), how we move (active or collective transportation rather than cars), how we live (house insulation, energy sources). Our level and sources of consumption are also paramount. Effecting change at the individual level requires appropriate infrastructure and legislation that will support positive behaviors. Lessons from the public health field on tobacco consumption or obesity have taught us that relying only on individuals is insufficient for a broad impact. We also need to work on structural aspects, such as infrastructure and legislation.

The fact that the majority of humans now live in urban areas (United Nations, 2019) is a great opportunity to have a major positive impact on the environment by rethinking how those are structured and organized. Many local experiences of ecological transition exist today, affecting different sectors of activity. The transition city movement, one example, started as an alternative model for responding to the impending peak oil, climate change in our oil-dependent societies, and infinite economic growth (Krauz, 2014; Semal, 2013). This movement, which originated in Great Britain (Alloun and Alexander, 2014; Hopkins, 2008, 2010; Semal, 2013; Smith, 2011), has expanded to the global scale (Smith, 2011). In Canada, for example, it operates in more than 100 communities (Poland et al., 2019). It aims to generate radical change, a post-carbon transition, leading to new lifestyles less dependent on the logic of economic expansion and based mainly on strengthening the resilience of communities (Krauz, 2014; Semal, 2013). The transition cities model involves relocating activities, acting locally, and strengthening local ties (Laigle, 2013). These initiatives are at an intermediate (meso) level of action, between the individual or citizen response and the government response, and are based on community mobilization (Chamberlin, 2009; Feola and Him, 2016; Hopkins, 2010; Jonet and Servigne, 2013; Laigle, 2013; Middlemiss and Parrish, 2010; Semal, 2013). Besides these bottom-up initiatives, we also see municipalities willing to transition from a resource-intensive model to low-carbon models, such as Stockholm’s decision to be carbon free by 2040 (City Executive Office, 2016).

Solutions are mostly needed at a more macro/societal level. National and international policies, because of their scope, can largely undo individual and community efforts or, conversely, have a strong positive effect. At this time, there is insufficient action at this level, and the OECD, UN Environment, and World Bank Group have recently released a report to support governments in undertaking ecological transition (OECD, 2018). Current knowledge on alternative ways of living shows there are other models for organizing our societies that would help us reach our targets. Again, the problem is not an inability to identify solutions, but rather a social and apolitical incapacity to implement these solutions.

Policies for planetary health would need to respect the following three major principles:

First, we need to support greener economic activities. This would translate into an energy and industry transition, along with incentives to better support sectors that would build healthier and more sustainable environments. This would involve “switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy, producing products with longer lifetimes, reducing unnecessary waste, shifting from animal to crop products, and investing in new technologies”5,29 (O’Neill et al., 2018: 5).

Second, planetary boundaries need to be respected. Economic growth is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a better quality of life. O’Neill and colleagues (2018) have analyzed scenarios that would allow people to live “a good life within planetary boundaries” (p. 5):

The first is to focus on achieving “sufficiency” in resource consumption. [. . .] A focus on sufficiency would involve recognizing that overconsumption burdens societies with a variety of social and environmental problems, and moving beyond the pursuit of GDP growth to embrace new measures of progress. It could also involve the pursuit of “degrowth” in wealthy nations, and the shift towards alternative economic models such as a steady-state economy. (p. 5)

Interestingly, they also show that the pursuit of sustainable development goals (SDGs) “has the potential to undermine the Earth-system” (O’Neill et al., 2018: 5). To reach the SDGs within planetary boundaries would mean shifting away from economic growth, dramatically reducing non-renewable resources use while supporting low-resource social provisioning systems.

Third, redistributive social policies need to be implemented. To respond positively to drastic changes and crises, communities and countries require greater resilience. Studies on resilience in countries experiencing economic crises have observed better population health outcomes when governments invested in social support rather than cutting budgets as recommended by international financial organizations (Karanikolos et al., 2013; Stuckler and Basu, 2013; Stuckler et al., 2009). Foundational writings in public health show that equity and social support matter for health. Even if causes of death change over time, a gradient of mortality persists, explained mainly by social status and inequities (Evans, 1994; Black et al., 1980). Policies that reduce social inequities will have a positive impact on population health. Greve’s (2012) work on happiness shows that countries with fewer social disparities also demonstrate greater happiness scores. Altogether, these writings show that, when basic needs are met, what matters most to increase happiness, health, and resilience is not the level of wealth, but welfare policies that reduce inequities. Implementing measures for an ecological transition will mean radical changes in balances of power, with consequences on employment. In this transition, welfare policies that reduce inequities effectively must be implemented to support workers and households. Such measures are likely to increase population resilience, health, and happiness (Alexander, 2015b).

In short, there are numerous solutions—technological, social, legal, economic, and others—to build healthier, happier, and sustainable societies. Our problem is not about what needs to be done; this knowledge already exists. The real question is, how do we initiate these necessary and radical changes at levels that will have a sufficient impact? The main obstacle is inertia at many levels: individual, institutional, governmental, international. Our community of evaluators is, unfortunately, illustrative of this state of affairs.

The response of our profession to living in the Anthropocene

Whereas the field of evaluation has always been at the leading edge in the development of new thinking, as in its contributions to constructivism, to knowledge use and transformative evaluation for social justice, this time we have not yet demonstrated we were capable of appropriately responding to this urgency for action. In other fields, expertise has been developing rapidly about action for climate change, environmental sustainability and ecological transition.

Organizations such as Future Earth, the World Bank, many United Nations Agencies such as UNEP for example, have taken strong positions with regard to the environmental urgency. As they are natural allies of our field, they have the potential to drive and support a transformation in evaluation approaches and practice. But our field is still lagging behind.

Some evaluators have been working on climate change for many years, mostly on adaptation, less on mitigation. Mitigation is action taken to permanently eliminate or reduce a risk or a hazard, while adaptation is the ability to adjust to a situation to moderate potential damage (Watkiss et al., 2015). Adaptation involves reducing vulnerability by identifying coping strategies (Bours et al., 2015). To increase resilience requires both mitigation and adaptation.

Frameworks, approaches, and evaluation cases now exist to evaluate and monitor climate change adaptation (Bours et al., 2015; Klostermann et al., 2018; Krause et al., 2015). Our being able to evaluate adaptations is important but by itself is not the transformation that is needed in our profession to contribute to addressing the impacts of climate change.

Working to mitigate the impacts on the environment amounts to proposing alternatives to the interventions in place or else suggesting major changes, which amount to adopting transformative approaches. Mitigation involves suggesting interventions, often radical, to reduce or eliminate risk.

Evaluators often claim they are in professional practice situations which do not allow them the option of adopting transformative approaches to evaluation. But, paradoxically, to reach environmental targets, governments will have to adopt transformative approaches to public policy making and implementation. Evaluation, as a profession should anticipate this and become an active participant in this unprecedented focus on both adaptation and mitigation-related interventions.

Very few evaluators address the broader challenge of environmental sustainability while addressing the question of development and we have a lot to learn from them. Expertise exists in our field, but it is still confined to areas that are perceived as specific domains of specialization when it needs to become mainstream in all our evaluations. Natural systems are being negatively impacted not only by specific actions, but also by the conjunction of all actions entrenched in the way we organize the many facets of our societies.

Addressing the environmental challenge will require adopting transformative and ecological approaches in all evaluations, adopting planetary lenses to respond to the wicked problem that analyzing the human and natural nexus constitutes (Uitto, 2019a; Bours et al., 2015). This work has fortunately started as some evaluators have recently raised awareness and suggested different approaches to evaluation: Rowe (2018, 2019), Uitto and colleagues (Uitto, 2019b; Uitto et al., 2017), Patton (2020). Other evaluators have been trying to integrate into their work some dimensions of environmental sustainability as they address questions related to international development (van den Berg et al., 2019, for example). But still, very few evaluators are adopting planetary health lenses in their approaches and practice, and we are still seeing major resistance to change in the evaluation community, and even to hearing about and discussing this topic. Why?

Is it a lack of awareness of the salience of the problem? This would be surprising, as this topic is ubiquitous in the news and there is a rapidly growing body of scientific literature on related topics, such as the Anthropocene, climate change, pollution, sustainable living, transformation, ecological transition, and social innovation. Furthermore, as a community, we have debated and are still debating the 19 SDGs. Adding to the strangeness of this situation is the fact that the SDGs, in fact, address many of the critical environmental dimensions. Goals 13, 14, and 15 are specifically about climate action and preservation of life below water and on land. Others address fundamental aspects of building environmentally sustainable societies: Goal 6—clean water and sanitation; Goal 11—making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable; Goal 12—responsible consumption and production. Even global justice is included: Goal 10—reducing inequalities.

If not caused by ignorance, could our inaction be due to a sense of powerlessness in the presence of a distressing new problem we feel unprepared to tackle? Is this challenge too complex and too huge, such that we are unable to grasp what it really represents? Gifford (2011) documented the psychological challenge that climate change presents for human beings, to explain the inaction we are observing. Yet our field is exemplary in being innovative, and there is certainly no lack of capacity within it. Evaluation is very well situated to identify solutions and open vistas for change and improvement.

What is it, then? Is it because “most evaluators think in a micro context, a legacy of evaluation practice that serves other disciplines, decision-makers, policy-makers, funding agencies and beneficiaries” (Mathison, 2018: 117)? Is it possible that we, as evaluators, are a contemporary analogue to those individuals and organizations that historically committed acts and made decisions amounting to what Hanna Arendt (1963) called “the banality of evil”? Has the system that has evolved internationally, wherein evaluators are consultants, sidelined the profession as a moral force in this rapidly evolving existential situation? Has the fact that we respond to commissioners’ requests/terms of reference led us to stand back—avoiding standing for values that go beyond our contractual commitments (Picciotto, 2015)? Have we sacrificed our capacity to be agents of social, economic, and political change? Has evaluation become a market good instead of being working the public good (Picciotto, 2015: 159)?

There is an urgency for action. Everything else will lose relevance if we let the situation deteriorate further. It is time for evaluators to be heard, as individuals and as a group. If not, we will undermine claims that we work for social betterment. We will become accomplices to the inertia that fails to confront the greatest threat humans have ever faced. As Mathison (2018) states,

Even though I do not assume that evaluation and evaluators alone are responsible for the public good, we suggest the work we do will make things better, lead to better outcomes, solve social and environmental problems. So, we need to own that claim. (p. 114)

Now what?

This challenge for environmental sustainability tests our collective ability to implement other ways of living, while also providing an opportunity to rethink how our societies are structured to promote health, happiness, and well-being for our families, communities, and populations (Alexander, 2015a, 2015b; Watts et al., 2015). These ecological and social challenges require, first, that we redefine our relationship with the environment. We need to relate to people, places, plants, and animals (Rock and Degeling, 2015; Rowe, 2018) in an approach that is eco-social, rather than anthropocentric (Hancock et al., 2015). Larrère (2016: 36) identifies a paradigmatic divide in our conceptions of our relationship with other living species and with nature in general: “Modern thought has continually been based on this division of the world between what is human and what is natural: man is subject, whereas nature is composed of objects.” We need to adopt other phenomenological representations of the world away from this divide and embrace pluralism and biodiversity.

The challenges of planetary health also call for interdisciplinary and intersectoral action. It is essential to mobilize state-of-the-art expertise in different areas (Lapinski et al., 2015) to have a transformative approach “where we do better things rather than simply doing the same things better” (Hancock et al., 2015: 14). Simply trying to improve our current ways of organizing our societies is inadequate to the task. We must change the paradigm, implement radical change, and consider our different sectors of activity according to what we want to accomplish.

Coming back to our field, there are concrete measures we can take in the very near term. We need to,

Create new evaluation theories and practices that include consideration of impacts on coupled human and natural systems, for planetary health. This change requires that we reconnect interventions to their environments and systematically assess their impacts on natural and human systems while envisioning ways to improve those interventions. Evaluators must consider the “broader context within which interventions operate” (Uitto, 2019b: 58) and we need to adopt planetary health lenses in all evaluations. This also involves thinking globally and long-term.

Think globally. We need to take into account risks and benefits for the global world. Air, water, biodiversity, pollution, climate change, and climate events do not respect countries’ boundaries. Countries that pollute the most create increased risks for countries more exposed to climate events, the latter often having a lesser capacity to adapt. For environmental justice purposes, we need to integrate this information into our evaluations.

Think long-term. Even if it is not always possible to measure long-term impacts, we must do our best to integrate them and have them influence our recommendations. High quality evaluations will consider all effects, including such impacts, and will not take short-cuts in representing causal chains. This is especially important because it is where environmental and socio-economic impacts are identified.

Adopt the values of environmental sustainability, health, and equity in all we do. Choices consistent with our values are fundamental to our profession and orient our work. We need to use the privilege we have to make a difference for our society. Let us make these values central in our practice. This involves framing our logic and change models differently, using layers to represent the interactions between interventions and their physical and socio-economic environments. All interventions have environmental and social impacts, but we have a tendency to persistently ignore them. It is time we reintegrate these major determinants of human health, well-being, and equity (Rowe, 2018).

Conduct prospective evaluations. We possess immense scientific and expert knowledge. Considering the urgency for action, we need to capitalize as much as possible on existing knowledge. Theory-based evaluations are existing approaches that could be used for this purpose.

Integrate different cultural perspectives. The current state of the planet testifies to the fact that our ways of thinking and working up to now have not been sufficient to bring good to all human beings and other living species. We need to draw inspiration from diverse ways of knowing. Some Indigenous cultures, for example, see the human being as part of, and not apart from, its environment (Rowe, 2018).

Integrate knowledge from various disciplines. We claim to be a transdiscipline (Scriven, 2008). But we need to do more to work across disciplinary boundaries, integrating knowledge developed in other fields such as ecological economics, sustainability transition, green energy, social economy, and so on. Many institutions have now developed research programs, in academic environments and beyond (see for example, the International Institute of Environment and Development, the Stockholm Environment Institute), in many pertinent areas, and more and more scientific events are related to transformation and sustainability transitions. This richness of knowledge opens up collaboration opportunities for evaluators with experts from various domains and varied organizations.

Revise our professional standards and ethical guidelines to enshrine environmental stewardship as a professional value. Professional standards and ethical guidelines can foster, for evaluators, the agency needed to defend the wider perspectives (long-term, global, connected) called for when conducting evaluations in the Anthropocene, beyond the micro-perspective of clients’ needs.

Train and mentor evaluators to better understand the world they are inheriting and how they can contribute to foster sustainability. We need to develop evaluation approaches that can stand up to the Anthropocene challenge, not as a subfield in evaluation but as a mainstream approach for the whole field. Fundamentally, our understanding of the dimensions of this crisis depends on generating and ultimately, taking into account scientific research results. Evaluators will have to develop new approaches to design and evaluate all interventions with planetary health lenses. Both early-career and experienced evaluators need to be trained in evaluation for planetary health. Fundamentally, fostering sustainability in our own values, behaviors and how we train and educate future evaluators, is a transformative agenda.

Fiercely defend evaluation and evaluators’ independence. As democratic evaluators, evaluators in the Anthropocene need to stand and speak truth to power (House, 2005 in Picciotto, 2015): to sponsors, commissioners, funders, and so on, to defend the importance of systematically considering the human and natural nexus, at a local and global scale, beyond and even despite commissioners’ preferences.

These 10 principles also will require that evaluators adopt a different role. We need evaluators who are the following:

Engaged: Shifting our practice will not be easy. It will require that we go beyond our client-focused evaluation mandate. In this time, we must transcend our roles as public servants, consultants or intellectuals and, through our professional activities, direct our research and our community involvement to contribute to the transformative changes required to strengthen the resilience of communities. We will need to confront fragmented visions and decision-making processes that can foster the banality of evil. We will need to manifest the broader picture of the evaluand, articulating and defending new approaches to evaluation. We will need to take courageous actions, including accepting financial risks, and be supported by the ethical standards of our profession. We will also be confronted with existing power relationships. Support for the status quo will be strong, and people will not easily accept changes that envision things differently.

Collaborative: We need the complementarity of various areas of expertise to grasp and adequately represent integrated environmental relationships. No one person can have all the knowledge needed. Our new practice will require that we work with different experts to conduct our evaluations appropriately. We need to build strategic alliances—for example, with sustainability scientists, natural systems managers, international, government, and non-profit organizations, and Indigenous communities.

Creative: We will all need to acquire new skills and adapt our approaches and methods. This can be seen as a constraint, but it also constitutes an immense opportunity for knowledge renewal in our field.

Conclusion

If social betterment is to be a collective goal for evaluators, then we need to re-think what that means now and in the future. It cannot exclude our impact on natural systems and their impacts on human systems. Increasingly, human-caused environmental changes are an existential threat that undermines our health and well-being.

If we continue to ignore or downplay this threat, we become part of the problem—business as usual in the face of growing evidence that our current natural systems as well as our economic and social structures are not sustainable. As professionals who claim to be committed to social betterment, we cannot separate our work from the ecological, social, and political contexts in which it is embedded. As human beings, we are involved; what we choose to do in exercising our professional roles and responsibilities amounts to deciding whether we believe we have a moral duty as professional evaluators to strive to make a difference.

This change will be challenging, but it will give us hope that we are working toward a better life and a healthier and safer environment for our children. If, when confronted with difficult times, you are hesitating today, think about how you will respond a few years from now, when your children or grandchildren ask “what did you do in the face of global environmental degradation?” “What did you do to fix it?” Change is possible, and time is short. Evaluators, it is time to act!

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to warmly thank Weronika Felcis, Zenda Ofir, Andy Rowe, and Juha Uitto for the stimulating discussions on their field and profession in this new era!

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Astrid Brousselle

Astrid Brousselle is a Professor and Director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Jim McDavid is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, Canada.

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