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In 2023, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice published Understanding political economy analysis and thinking and working politically. This complementary note sets out more detailed guidance on how to undertake a dynamic Stakeholder Analysis and Political Network Mapping, which are core elements of political economy analysis and other forms of politically informed context analysis. This technical note is for use...

Regenerative Evaluation: Evaluation in Service of Life To foster change today means navigating a gap between two realities: the reality of reporting (demanding accountability and proof of impact) and the reality of the planet (calling for regeneration, complexity, and interconnectedness). For too long, evaluation has forced a choice, functioning as an extractive exercise—mining data to count the "fruits" of a project while ignoring the health of the "soil" that sustains them....

This learning paper on funding and entrepreneurship support for adaptation and resilience is a collaboration between SILP and the Climate Adaptation Innovation & Learning Initiative project. It brings together real-world insights from a community of 25 practitioners working across intermediary roles in the climate adaptation and resilience sector. Rather than presenting a fixed model, the paper explores how intermediaries operate in the “in-between spaces”, navigating tensions between...

Despite widespread endorsement of locally led development, donor agencies still struggle to translate local agency into cumulative change. Donor discourse increasingly emphasises localisation and community leadership, yet operational arrangements remain structured around upward compliance. The practical question is how local agency and institutional accountability can work together so that locally generated insights lead the way while portfolio coherence is maintained. This paper examines a...

AI’s role in evaluation: so long and thanks for all the synthesis How generative AI can enhance evaluation and analysis? We share three real-world case studies to explore what works, what doesn’t, and how to harness AI responsibly. Generative AI is everywhere—but is it really the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything? At Itad, we see AI as a powerful assistant, not a replacement for human judgment. Our new learning brief, The evaluator’s guide to generative AI, shares lessons from...

This supplemental guide offers practical advice for thinking and working politically (TWP) when practicing the Conservation Standards. The CS are a widely used, systematic approach for planning, monitoring, and adapting programs aiming to conserve biodiversity. TWP is an approach to international development that brings greater attunement to the political dynamics of the local programming context in order to enhance development results. Given strong evidence that political factors...

Citizens' assemblies and other democratic innovations are spreading around the world. But they do not spread by themselves. Behind every successful scaling story sits a constellation of organisations doing the essential, often invisible work of building capacity, establishing networks, advocating with decision makers, and ensuring quality standards. These are what we call scaling catalysts: organisations that intentionally drive the expansion of democratic innovations in their regions. In...

The Digital Justice Network produced a guide that originated from the realisation that civil society organisations and activists need help in establishing generative AI policies and properly utilise these tools when necessary. “Some of our activists are drafting statements with ChatGPT, and I’m worried about what approach we should take.” Many organisations are likely having similar concerns. With the emergence of various generative AI services—such as chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, and...

This practical guide from the UK Evaluation Society explores how evaluators can use AI tools responsibly and transparently across all stages of the evaluation process.

Earlier this year we spoke to 102 leaders from across the globe to ask: Ten years from now, what will we regret not having done today? This framing turned out to be a powerful device for collective horizon scanning and foresight. Across every conversation there was a sense that this moment demands more from us all, along with a strong eagerness to explore what we can own and act on. More than that, these discussions surfaced direction, hope and a way forward. From CEOs, professors, PhDs,...

Healthy Cities for Adolescents Phase II (HCA-II) is a multi-country programme that supports projects working to improve adolescent and young people’s health and wellbeing in intermediary cities. Guided by the principle of shifting the status quo, with adolescents at the centre of this, HCA-II aims to catalyse meaningful changes in how cities function for young people. This guide aims to help you influence the systems that shape adolescent and young people’s health and wellbeing in the...

This paper shares an insider's perspective on the spread of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) across the US Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighting lessons learned along the way that are relevant even beyond the dissolution of the Agency in 2025.

While enthusiasm for systems change has grown steadily over the past decade, we find a significant gap persists between this enthusiasm and execution. Funders attempting to implement systems change consistently face 9 challenges, including unclear outcome attribution, long commitment horizons, and complex stakeholder coordination. When faced with these challenges, it is understandable why many funders find themselves defaulting to patching the system rather than changing it. The pressures...

The CGIAR 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy commits organizational change with seven ways of working, including “Making the digital revolution central to our way of working”. In that context, Artificial Intelligence (AI), introduces both opportunities and risks to evaluation practice. Guided by the CGIAR-wide Evaluation Framework, integrating AI tools requires a governance approach to balance innovation with ethical responsibility, ensuring transparency, fairness, accountability, and...

Today’s critical challenges are complex and require system level change. Issues like ending poverty, reversing biodiversity collapse, creating more equitable and sustainable food systems, or ending health inequalities, will not respond to neat siloed technical interventions. These are not problems we can tackle head on. Rather, we need to change the conditions (systems) that create these problems. Consequently, many of the most ambitious philanthropic foundations are adopting ‘systems...

One of the main questions evaluators have when using AI is: "How can I know if it performs well?" To answer this question, we have developed a guidance note aimed at capturing what we have learned so far about integrating AI into evaluation and to offer a framework for further exploration. Since we began our experiments with Large Language Models (LLMs) in the Spring of 2023, we have made significant progress in using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) for processing and analyzing...