Patton, M. Q. (2019).

Transformation to global sustainability: Implications for evaluation and

evaluators. In G. Julnes (Ed.), Evaluating Sustainability: Evaluative Support for Managing
Processes in the Public Interest. New Directions for Evaluation, 162, 103–117.

6
Transformation to Global Sustainability:
Implications for Evaluation and Evaluators
Michael Quinn Patton

Abstract
Sustainability has traditionally been associated with maintaining programs and
their results over time, especially after focused funding has been withdrawn.
This is a static view of sustainability. With the infusion of systems thinking and
complexity theory into evaluation, and in the face of climate change and the
vision for the future of humanity represented by the Sustainability Development
Goals, sustainability has become associated with major and rapid transforma-
tion of global systems and the resilience of transformed systems to adapt over
time. This is a dynamic view of sustainability with implications for both design
of transformation initiatives and evaluating them. Evaluating transformation
means transforming evaluation. Evaluation for transformational sustainability
treats the whole Earth as the evaluand and the future of humanity on Earth as
the essential sustainability issue, and does so with a sense of urgency. © 2019
Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

I n a keynote address on One Planet Transformation by Terry A’Hearn,

CEO, Scottish Environmental Protection Agency at the University of
Dundee (August, 2017), the third in a series of international interdis-
ciplinary conferences focusing on transformations toward sustainability, he
concluded:

For the world as a whole, we are consuming the Earth’s resources as if we

have 1.7 planets. We only have one.
NEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION, no. 162, Summer 2019 © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation
Association. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/ev.20362 103
104 EVALUATING SUSTAINABILITY

We are all heading in the wrong direction. There isn’t a single country that has
reversed its over-use of the planet yet. Incremental change isn’t enough. We
need transformational change. We need to transform our society and world
to one that lives within what one planet can support. (A’Hearn, 2017)

The authors in this volume are aware of the need for transformation.
Julnes opens by reviewing different definitions and meanings of sustain-
ability. Chelimsky offers a comprehensive checklist for incorporating a sus-
tainability perspective into evaluation theory and practice. Rowe sounds
a “call to action” for incorporating a two-system framework connecting
human and natural systems to design sustainability-ready evaluations. Uitto
presents evaluation at the nexus of environment and development address-
ing the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) and integrating three
dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social. Porter
and Hawkins focus on the sustainability of evaluation systems including the
analysis of how funders and evaluators constitute interacting systems that
may approach sustainability differently. Julnes concludes this volume with
attention to managing the processes of sustainability in the public interest.
What I find missing, and want to add, is a sense of urgency.
Scientific reports now appear monthly documenting the accelerating
pace and dire implications of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations (UN) body assigned with
assessing the science related to climate change. Ninety-one scientists and
review editors from forty countries prepared the 2018 IPCC report, which
concluded that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global
warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels, and diminishing
Arctic sea ice, among other changes. We have roughly a decade to make
major changes to reverse these trends, after which the effects will accu-
mulate and worsen as we will have passed the point of no return. Among
other consequences, the report describes a world of disappearing shorelines,
worsening food shortages, increasing wildfires, a massive die-off of coral
reefs, and loss of entire ecosystems. The report finds that limiting global
warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in
land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-
caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) would need to fall by about 45%
from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching “net zero” around 2050. (IPCC, 2018).
By the time this volume is published, warnings about our collective
unsustainable future are likely to have become even more dire. The Con-
ference of the Parties to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (COP24,
2018) included 14,000 delegates from 195 countries convened to negotiate
how countries can meet the Paris Agreement targets. At the opening session,
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned: “We are in trouble. It is
hard to comprehend why we are collectively still moving too slowly—and
even in the wrong direction.” COP24 produced a “rule book” for putting
into practice the Paris Agreement of 2015. “But after all is said and done, the

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2°C goal, let alone the 1.5°C aspiration, remain distant prospects. The world
is on course for more or less 3°C of warming with Kiribati and the Marshall
Islands being the first countries at risk of submersion” (Economist, 2018).
At the 2018 annual conference of the American Evaluation Association,
following my presentation on the urgency of dealing with climate change,
those in attendance acknowledged the crisis but said that no funders of
evaluation were interested in addressing climate change in the projects they
fund.
There is the problem in a nutshell. The future sustainability of the
Earth and humanity has reached a crisis level, but having acknowledged
that, people go on about their business and hope that others deal with the
crisis. This chapter argues that the crisis of planetary sustainability demands
transformation of all economic, institutional, societal, and ecological sys-
tems together, that evaluating such transformation requires transformation
of evaluation, and that failure to seriously address global transformation in
everything we do as evaluators makes us part of the problem, not part of
the solution. In so doing, I am going beyond my mandate to simply review
and synthesize the chapters in this volume. My conclusion is that the con-
tributions to this volume have not sufficiently conveyed the magnitude and
urgency of the global sustainability crisis, the transformational nature of the
solutions needed, and the urgency of evaluating the scale, scope, nature, and
sufficiency of transformation toward planetary sustainability.
I will begin by identifying how the dominant perspective on sustain-
ability constitutes a barrier to transformation. Transformation as the path-
way to global sustainability has significant evaluation implications, which
I will explicate.

Traditional and Still Dominant Evaluation Criterion

for Sustainability
The criteria formulated in 1991 by the Development Assistance Committee
(DAC) Network on Development Evaluation of the Organization of
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) may well be the most
widely used set of evaluation criteria in the world. International agencies
worldwide apply these criteria which call for evaluations to examine a
program’s (1) relevance, (2) effectiveness, (3) efficiency, (4) impact, and
(5) sustainability.
Sustainability is concerned with measuring whether the benefits of an
activity are likely to continue after donor funding has been withdrawn . . . .
[so] it is useful to consider the following questions:
• To what extent did the benefits of a programme or project continue after
donor funding ceased?
• What were the major factors which influenced the achievement or non-
achievement of sustainability of the programme or project? (DAC, 1991,
p. 1)

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The DAC definition above conceptualizes sustainability as continuity

of achieved results. This has been and remains the dominant perspective
on sustainability by funders, those who receive funds, and, therefore, of
evaluators. This criterion is quite understandable from a funder perspective.
Funders want to see change and want those changes to be maintained. Eval-
uators are commissioned to determine both whether the intended changes
occurred, and if so, whether they can be sustained. This is fundamentally
an accountability perspective imposed from the perspective of funders who
must demonstrate that they have made good use of the assets entrusted to
them. However, sustainability as continuation is linear, mechanistic, and
static. It is a logic of moving from one condition (a problem) to a new con-
dition (a solution) in a way that the problem does not recur and the solution
lasts. This is how evaluators have come to think and practice, but this way of
conceptualizing and evaluating sustainable change is a fundamental barrier
to transformation.
The authors in this volume have moved well beyond this narrow defi-
nition of sustainability. Their view of sustainability centers on adaptability
and resilience, dimensions that are dynamic, complex, and developmental
(Patton, 2011, ch. 7). What has not been sufficiently acknowledged, in my
view, is how dramatically such a perspective of sustainability departs from
the dominant paradigm under which most evaluations operate.

The Model Project Mentality of Sustainability

More than continuity is involved in the static conceptualization of sustain-
ability. The dominant focus of evaluation has been and remains a project
or program model. What we call in our jargon the “evaluand” (Scriven,
1995, p. 68), the thing evaluated, determines the focus and methods of an
evaluation. We have been socialized to design interventions using project
thinking, indoctrinated in how to make meaning of what we see by reducing
complex dynamic systems to linear logic models. The mechanistic concep-
tualization of sustainability as continuity leads directly and inevitably to a
static view of scaling. The world is in search of scalable models. Scaling
a model invites fidelity evaluation: Was the model replicated in new sites
exactly as prescribed? Evaluations using randomized controlled designs
are fundamentally based on a search for standardized, replicable, scalable
models. The view of global change represented by this paradigm is spread-
ing effective models worldwide through replication. Evaluation remains in
the grip of this self-limiting project mentality. Such tools as logic models
and SMART1 goals work well for project and program evaluation. They do
not work well, are not useful, for evaluating global systems change geared
toward dynamic, adaptive, and resilient sustainability.

1
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant/realistic, time-bound/
timely.

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All the authors in this volume focus on changing systems, making

systems the evaluand and emphasizing that context matters. Standardized
replication is static. Systems change is dynamic, contextually adaptive, and
resilient in the face of the uncertainties and turbulence of complexity Sus-
tainability becomes a characteristic or quality of systems, then, not a matter
of rigidly continuing standardized program models. Sustainable systems are
adaptive and resilience. Evaluating the nature and scope of resilient sustain-
ability is an altogether different proposition from evaluating the continuity
of static, standardized models. The chapters in this volume all treat systems
thinking as the new direction for sustainability, including conceptualizing
evaluation in systems terms (Porter & Hawkins).

A Global Systems Perspective

Global systems change initiatives are addressing global problems like cli-
mate change, worldwide poverty, the international refugee challenge, and
related issues at the center of planetary sustainability. Fundamentally, eval-
uating global systems change interventions is different from evaluating
projects and programs. Interventions introduced into complex dynamic
systems unfold in open systems characterized by volatility, uncertainty,
and unpredictability, all of which make control problematic. Those design-
ing and implementing systems change interventions must be innovative,
adaptive, responsive, nimble, and agile. Evaluations under such condi-
tions must be emergent, developmental, adaptable, dynamic, and respon-
sive. If evaluators force complex systems change interventions into tradi-
tional project boxes aimed at standardization, predictability, simple, linear
attribution, and static continuity, they inhibit innovation, adaptation, and
responsiveness.

The Insidiousness of the Project Mentality

The project mentality is not just an evaluation problem. Forcing complex
systems change interventions into traditional project boxes with linear logic
models aimed at SMART goals occurs among the full range of people and
institutions attempting to bring about change. Time and time again, as a
participant in international conferences focused on global systems transfor-
mation, I have witnessed the challenges being framed as complex, multidi-
mensional, multilayered, cross-silos, and dynamic with full recognition of
the necessity of being innovative and adaptive. Then, what followed were
presentations on projects and programs that were anything but transforma-
tional by their very conceptualization and accompanying evaluations. Lead-
ers and implementers know how to deliver projects and programs. Report-
ing, monitoring, and accountability templates are based on project logic.
Evaluators reinforce the project mentality at every stage of their engagement
from participation in logic modeling to selection of methods and measures,
right on through to analyzing data and presenting findings.

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The project mentality has thrived for half a century. The project mind-
set is dominant in every sphere of change. The project approach is deeply
embedded in institutional strategies. The project mentality is insidious and
dangerous, as is any mindset that becomes dogmatic. As French philosopher
Émile Chartier (1868–1951) observed, “Nothing is more dangerous than
an idea when it is the only one you have.” Or as stated in more colloquial
wisdom, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all
you know how to design and/or evaluate are projects, then everything you
do will take the form of a project.
However, if we have learned anything in 50 years of international devel-
opment and corresponding evaluation, autonomous and isolated projects and
programs do not lead to major systems change or global transformation.
Let me pause here to emphasize that this is not an attack on projects
and programs, or project and program evaluation. Effective projects and
programs help a great many people. What they do not do is change systems.
Indeed, my conclusion after evaluating programs over five decades is that
effective programs often succeed in insulating themselves from the status-
quo-serving systems that surround them. They create islands of protected
effectiveness in a sea of need and suffering. They do good, but they do not
do transformative good.
On the other hand, projects and programs that are ineffective often fail
because they are not able to insulate themselves from the status-quo-serving
systems that surround them, and of which they are a part. They are crushed
in their attempts to innovate by the dominant forces in those systems that
push back against and undermine their efforts at change.
I invite you to make your own judgment. Look around you. How much
major systems change do you see going on? Not just talked about, but actu-
ally going on.
The new direction in this volume—and it is a new direction—
reconceptualizes sustainability in ways that transcend the dominant project
model mentality. What I am attempting to do here is highlight the scale and
scope of that transformative thinking. Still, this volume appropriately por-
trays evaluation as a dynamic field that has evolved, and continues to evolve,
a field that reflects changes in societal interests, concerns, approaches to
change, and priorities even as evaluation and evaluators affect thinking
among those who design and fund change initiatives about what can be
done, and what should be done, based on innovations and breakthroughs
in how evaluations are conceptualized and conducted—which brings us
back to the need for transformation.

Resilient Sustainability as Goal, Transformation as Pathway

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act

with yesterday’s logic”

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 TRANSFORMATION TO GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY 109

Distinguished management consultant Peter Drucker

(quoted by Carrigan, 2010, p. 99).

This volume’s focus on resilient sustainability makes the case for its
importance as a core evaluation criterion. Julnes (Chapter 7) points out
that evaluators are already addressing sustainability at multiple levels and
domains, including sustainability of communities, public programs, and
even of evaluation efforts. However, we need to up our game in the face
of the global climate change crisis.
For the last few years, I have been engaged with reviewing and design-
ing evaluations for major global initiatives aimed at reversing our cur-
rent unsustainable planetary trajectory. Concerns about sustainability have
gained momentum and, in so doing, have evolved into a need for more
urgent and dramatic global systems change, what is being called Transfor-
mation. Calls for transformation flow from the conclusion that dealing with
climate change and related challenges requires major and rapid changes in
global systems. In what follows, I will draw on the contributions in this vol-
ume to conceptualize transformational sustainability and the implications
for evaluation.

Transformation as Vision
Calls for transformation flow from two streams, one values-based and
visionary, the other crisis-focused and fear-of-calamity-driven. Let us begin
with transformation as vision. The transformational vision flows from the
hopes expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in
1948) and subsequently in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (adopted
in 1959). All people, all of humankind, young and old, have the right to
food, water, sanitation, security, shelter, respect, and dignity. As expressed
in the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015,
entitled Transforming Our World (UN, 2015), transformation means No One
Left Behind (Segone & Tateossian, 2017). Thus, in this vision, sustainabil-
ity and equity, combined, are the foundation for transformation. This links
sustainability to equity and transformation. This vision for evaluation’s role
in the world was articulated in the theme of the 2014 annual conference
of the American Evaluation Association (AEA): Visionary Evaluation for a
Sustainable, Equitable Future: “Take a visionary step beyond your current
evaluation approach toward one that contributes just a little more to a sus-
tainable, equitable future for all” (AEA President Parsons, 2014).

Transformation as Crisis-Driven to Avoid Catastrophe

Beyond hopeful vision, crisis-driven calls for transformation are aimed at
reversing our current unsustainable planetary trajectory. Two conclusions
frame the doomsday perspective:”

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110 EVALUATING SUSTAINABILITY

1. Humanity’s use of the Earth’s resources for both production and con-
sumption is unsustainable.
2. Transformation globally is urgently required to avoid a catastrophe—
meaning the end of human life on Earth.

Let me briefly augment the case that transformation is urgently needed.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is a collaboration of some twenty
philanthropic foundations that aim to strategically leverage resources and
knowledge, develop frameworks and pathways for change, and push for
transformation toward more sustainable food and agriculture systems glob-
ally. In 2012, the member foundations came together with a shared belief
that the current global food system is not sustainable, particularly when
coupled with climate change and shifting global economics, politics, and
demographics. The Global Alliance brought together ten experts in agroe-
cology, agricultural development, and food systems who expressed diverse
views on what changes should be priorities for action. However, in their
closing comments, in which they were asked for the most important mes-
sage they had to convey, each spoke with a sense of urgency: The urgent need
to get beyond complacency, to take seriously the likelihood that there is a
point of no return, that, if not already passed, looms closer and closer.
At a conference on transformation at the University of Dundee (August,
2017), the third in a series of international interdisciplinary confer-
ences focusing on transformations toward planetary sustainability, Suzanne
Moser, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, concluded in her
keynote as follows:
Before we went to transformation conferences, we went to adaptation confer-
ences, mitigation conferences, sustainability conferences, but now we have
arrived at a place where we know we need transformation, we need to do
much deeper work. Transformation is not just a faddish word or idea. It cap-
tures the scale and scope of what must change if it is life we want, for the
future of life is in doubt and cannot be taken for granted.

We have to deeply investigate the practices, structures, and institutions that

underlie climate change and all things unsustainable, as well as the relation-
ships, belief systems, values, and ethics that seem to not let us shift away fast
enough. If it is life we want.

Million Belay is coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in

Africa (AFSA), a broad alliance of different civil society actors that are advo-
cating for and working toward food sovereignty and agroecology in Africa.
In a blog, he wrote:
I globe trot from one meeting to another. Some of us are caught up in this cycle
and there seems to be no way out of it. Anyway, this year (2017), I participated
in nine international meetings. I was active in all of them either as part of the

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organizing group or as a presenter. There is one thread connecting all of them:

transformation.

At last there is a realization that change, fundamental change in the way we

are living, is needed . . . . I think that the majority of us are all caught up in this
paradox of deeply understanding the kind of transformation that is needed
but being part of perpetuating the same system that we hate so much. (Belay,
2017)

Prognostications warning about humanity being on a trajectory toward

ultimate demise are hardly new (Malthus, 1798; Carson, 1962; Club of
Rome, 1972; Ehrlich, 1968). However, “climate change changes every-
thing.” This assessment from Prof. Ioan Fazey, Director of the Centre for
Environmental Change and Human Resilience, University of Dundee, sum-
marizes succinctly the foregoing glimpses into the realities of our current
planetary trajectory.

A Balanced Perspective
Of course, there are dissenting views and contrary evidence, and it is the
responsibility of evaluators, and a source of our credibility, that we examine
the evidence, both pro and con, and draw balanced conclusions, a point
stressed by Eleanor Chelimsky in Chapter 4. Urgent calls for transformation
can make it difficult to find balance and see both the challenges ahead and
positive developments already underway. The last few years have included
major increases in solar energy use, millions of acres of forest restoration,
significant initiatives aimed at pollution reduction, extreme poverty
decreasing worldwide, public health breakthroughs, phasing out of coal
production and use, policy changes aimed at reducing fossil fuel use, and
worldwide commitments to reduce inequality and increase sustainability
(Gates, 2018, January 15; Hervey, 2017; Pinker, 2018; Rosling, 2018). Ana-
lysts emphasizing humans’ adaptive capacity and Earth’s inherent resilience
include conservation biologist Chris Thomas (2018) who argues that ani-
mals and plants are adapting to changes in the world humans are creating,
transformations that bode well for the future viability of diverse ecosystems
globally. At the beginning of 2018, New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristoff, whose op-ed pieces regularly document human oppression,
degradation, deep poverty, and human rights violations worldwide, featured
his analysis of “Why 2017 was the best year in human history” (Kristoff,
2018). He cited numerous positive indicators including fewer people
living in poverty, high quality of life for millions, and greater educational
opportunities for more people, especially girls around the world. Cognitive
scientist Steven Pinker (2018) has written a best-selling book entitled
Enlightenment Now in which he argues that the doomsday trajectory is not
just a little wrong but “wrong, wrong, flat-earth wrong” (p. 6). In over 500
pages, he presents data showing that life has been getting better in virtually

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every realm of human experience. He optimistically expects that positive

trajectory to prevail indefinitely. Likewise, Rosling, the great Swedish global
health statistician, has written a book with his son and daughter-in-law enti-
tled Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things
are Better Than You Think.
In trying to make sense of diametrically opposed views of humanity’s
sustainability trajectory—prosperity or calamity, Chris Kutarna, co-author
of The Age of Discovery (Goldin & Kutarna, 2016), advises:

The thing to step back and challenge ourselves with, is to recognize that in a
disruptive moment, linear expectations of the future are not going to cut it,
are not going to help us to navigate and set good expectations for what’s to
come, that the better mindset is to recognize that this is a deeply contested
moment, that this is both the best time and one of the most fragile times to be
alive and to decide and to act forward from that perspective. It’s challenging
ourselves to recognize that there are a lot of positive forces operating in the
world right now. (Kutarna, 2016)

One of those positive forces, hopefully, is new directions for

transformation-focused, sustainable evaluation.

Evaluating Transformation Requires Transforming Evaluation

Julnes, (Chapter 1) reviews several sustainability frameworks, including the
Triple Bottom Line and basic principles of sustainability. Rowe presents five
points as a draft checklist for conducting a sustainability-ready evaluation
that integrates the human and natural domains. Chelimsky asks seventeen
questions that constitute an evaluation checklist for strategic sustainability.
Uitto provides a nexus for evaluating sustainability “with the social and
economic dimensions lying on the foundation of the natural environment.”
Porter and Hawkins direct our attention to the nature of evaluation systems
that would be capable of addressing sustainability.
Transformational initiatives must be multifaceted, multidimensional,
multisectoral, multinational, and multiplicative. Transformation flows from
an understanding that the status quo is not a viable path forward and that
action on multiple fronts using multiple change strategies across multi-
ple landscapes will be needed to overcome the resistance from those who
benefit from the status quo. Multiple interventions are needed to multiply
effects, creating streams of diverse interventions flowing together to gen-
erate mammoth change in global systems. Thus, transformation is simul-
taneously and interactively global and local at the same time, contextually
sensitive and rooted while being globally manifest and sustainable. Tracking
these new, transformational initiatives will require a complex global systems
change approach to evaluation meaning that evaluation must be developed
and adapted if it is to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

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Transforming Evaluation for Evaluating Transformation

The concluding premise I take from the contributors to this volume, and my
own assessment of the situation, is that traditional program evaluation will
not suffice to address transformational systems change on a global scale. In
closing, I offer principles for designing and evaluating transformational sus-
tainability derived in part from contributions to this volume. Extrapolated
from the contributions to this volume, analysis of transformative social
movements (Westley, Zimmerman,& Patton, 2006), and work I have been
doing on what I am calling Blue Marble Evaluation (global systems change
evaluation, Patton, 2019), I have identified four principles for designing
and implementing transformation initiatives that have transformative
implications for evaluation. This is by no means an exhaustive list of pos-
sible principles, but these principles illustrate the interconnection between
transformation principles and corresponding evaluation criteria. (For a
discussion of principles-focused evaluation, see Patton, 2018; for detailed
elaboration of these principles, see Patton, 2019).
Transformation Principle 1: Global–Local Dynamic Interconnec-
tion Principle.
Connect global and local perspectives, knowledge, and understandings
in support of change. Global systems change must be contextually sensitive
and grounded in the interactions between local and global processes and
scales of change. The term that captures this is GLOCAL (Steger, 2013,
p. 2). For evaluation, this means applying a multilevel connectivity crite-
rion: Assess global–local interactions and interconnections. This likely will
involve documenting contextual variations locally within a coherent global
pattern of transformation.
Andy Rowe, in this volume, explains why it is critical to include
local knowledge and understandings, especially and importantly indige-
nous knowledge and understandings, in designing, implementing, and eval-
uating for sustainability. He emphasizes that the worldview of Indigenous
peoples is very different and regards all natural things as equal and all part
of the whole, understanding the human–nature relationship as one of stew-
ardship with responsibility to respect and sustain other species and natural
things. He offers the premise that an indigenous evaluation built on indige-
nous worldviews is potentially already sustainability-ready.
Juha Uitto, in this volume, presents a case study of the evaluation of
a global initiative in which the analysis found that the local and global
environmental benefits are closely interrelated and that local support
for improved environmental management must provide benefits to local
people.
Transformation Principle 2: Cross-Sector Principle.
Integrate and coordinate interventions across sectors and traditional
program areas (cutting across silos). Transformational interventions work
across sector divisions and program specializations. The first principle (#1

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114 EVALUATING SUSTAINABILITY

above) concerns the global focus of an intervention. This second principle

concerns cutting across program silos to achieve integration and synthesis.
Part of the barrier of model project thinking is that projects and programs
tend to be narrowly siloed. As closed systems with specific, limited, and
delimited targeted outcomes, the very effectiveness of projects and pro-
grams is predicated on their narrow focus.
The SDGs are also silos. The seventeen SDG goals identify 169 targets
and 230 indicators. Much of the massive national and international report-
ing machinery for monitoring the SDGs treats them as isolated indicators
rather than examining their interconnections and interdependence. Trans-
formative sustainability transcends nation-states and is essential for human
rights and gender equality goals to be attained. With regard to the SDGs,
Uitto emphasizes the importance of assuming an integrated perspective, one
in which attention is paid to “the interlinkages at different levels: across sec-
tors (e.g., finance, agriculture, energy, and transport); across societal actors
(local authorities, government agencies, private sector, and NGOs).
Rowe addresses this as the challenge of understanding and taking
into account the interconnected dimensions of the human–nature connec-
tion. From his perspective, the sustainability-ready evaluation will be a
connected evaluation that reaches the public policy goals. It will not be
bounded by contemporary partitioned and sectoral evaluation approaches.
Evaluation we have today treats human and natural systems as unconnected
and rarely considers the natural system.
Global systems change initiatives cut across SDG and other silos. Eval-
uators, then, should apply an integration criterion: Assess the extent to
which a transformation-aspiring initiative addresses multiple interrelated
factors (across silos) and diverse interconnected outcomes, and the extent
to which and ways in which the transitional process is managed for trans-
formational sustainability.
Transformation Principle 3: Multiple Intervention Strategies
Principle.
Target mixed and multiple types of changes. Transformation requires
multiple interacting strategies on multiple fronts: regulatory, policy, incen-
tives, education, organizing, services crossing social, economic, and envi-
ronmental arenas. For evaluators, this means applying a strategic integration
criterion: Track and analyze the interactions and synergies of multiple and
diverse interventions and initiatives.
Eleanor Chelimsky’s chapter is especially informative and insight-
ful in this regard. She identifies three alternative policy–action strategies:
(1) authoritative (coercive); (2) collaborative; and (3) informational. She
emphasizes adapting the strategy to the context in which change is being
attempted. For evaluators, she advises that when assessing sustainability,
“the ambient balance of public-interest values needs to be carefully consid-
ered in estimating the likely success of a policy–action strategy.” However,
from a transformation perspective, her summary conclusion is the gem:

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“From a sustainability perspective, it may be important to consider varying

approaches, contained within a single overall strategy.” She discusses both
integrated initiatives, which employ multiple strategies simultaneously, and
sequential approaches, in which the policy–action strategy involves suc-
cessive evaluations as the basis for “moving up the ladder of coerciveness.
That is, once evidence of failures firmly established over a long enough
period of time, it makes sense to increase the price of behaviors that con-
flict with a consensual value like public health.” She calls on evaluators to
be knowledgeable about the evidence base for the effectiveness of various
policy–action strategies. In the current environment, where the urgency and
scale of needed transformation calls for major, rapid, cross-silo, local-global,
and complexity-informed systems change, simultaneous, multifaceted, and
multilevel pursuit of diverse strategies is most consistent with the theory of
transformation. This also means that evaluators must be able to track these
diverse strategies both individually and interactively.
Transformation Principle 4: Design and Implement
Transformation-Aspiring Interventions for Adaptive Resilience.
Sustainability as adaptive resilience is dynamic, complex, and
developmental in formulation and evaluation. For evaluators, this points to
a resilient sustainability criterion: Assess sustainability over time for adaptive
resilience as dynamic, complex, and developmental in formulation and
evaluation.

Evaluation’s Role in Transformative Sustainability

Evaluation’s role is to track, document, connect, and support sustainable
transformation at all levels of change. Even more, evaluation can be the
glue that holds together and focuses the diverse actions leading toward
transformation. Each evaluator and every evaluation can contribute toward
critical mass, adding energy, insight, learning, and knowledge toward the
tipping point of transformative sustainability. We, as evaluators, are not
outside the global system, independent from it, but rather a part of it. The
contributors to this volume tell us how to integrate brainpower with that
muscle power. Especially powerful in this regard is the vision of networked
evaluators provided by Porter and Hawkins. Evaluation systems made up of
networked evaluators constituting a global community of practice engaged
in evaluating transformative sustainability is a vision of evaluation making
a difference to the future of the planet and humanity. George Julnes reminds
us to watch out for the conflicting goals of sustainable development which
are deeply political.
Eleanor Chelimsky envisions evaluators bringing their knowledge and
expertise to bear in the design of sustainability interventions, and urges
that it is “essential for evaluators, at the beginning of their work, to rou-
tinely analyze the sustainability issues presented by the formulation of the

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION • DOI: 10.1002/ev

116 EVALUATING SUSTAINABILITY

intervention, and report back to planners and implementers likely difficul-

ties and potential solutions.”
Juha Uitto emphasizes that in studying projects that have been partic-
ularly transformative, they were all supported by an adequate policy and
economic environment.
The consistent message of this volume is that evaluating sustainabil-
ity requires transforming evaluation. Andy Rowe is especially insistent and
insight about the interconnections between evaluating sustainability and
transforming evaluation:
• “If evaluation were to address sustainability, this would be transforma-
tive.”
• “Developing a sustainability-ready evaluation will be transformational for
evaluation because it requires incorporation of different worldviews that
regard human and natural systems as coupled and each important.”
• “Absent transformations to become sustainability-ready, evaluation will
lack relevance for many of the current and future issues of our times.
Fields lacking relevance are themselves not sustainable.” “Sustainabil-
ity is and will continue to be evaluated; the question is whether the
evaluation field wants to contribute or if assessment of sustainability
will continue to be undertaken by those with more sustainability-ready
approaches but lacking the special attributes of evaluation.”
Evaluating transformation requires transforming evaluation, especially
and centrally, changing the criteria for evaluating sustainability from a
mechanical, static engineering conceptualization to an organic, complexity-
based, and resilience mindset.

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MICHAEL QUINN PATTON, has a doctorate in sociology from the University of

Wisconsin, Madison. He is former president of the American Evaluation Asso-
ciation and author of eight evaluation books, including Blue Marble Evaluation
(2019), which focuses on the issues in this volume.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION • DOI: 10.1002/ev