What changed
The 2010s opened with the results agenda at full strength — logframes, value-for-money frameworks, standard indicators, "payment by results" — and closed with a broad consensus that measurement had crowded out learning. Andrew Natsios's phrase "obsessive measurement disorder" (2010) became the shorthand for the diagnosis.
The 2015 volume The Politics of Evidence and Results in International Development (Eyben, Guijt, Roche and Shutt, from the Big Push Forward network) argued that practitioners should "play the game to change the rules".
Craig Valters at ODI made the case that theories of change should be learning tools rather than donor artefacts, and Dan Honig's Navigation by Judgment (2018) supplied quantitative evidence that tight top-down control degrades aid outcomes precisely in the unpredictable environments where it is most often applied.
In parallel the evaluation-theory literature on use and influence was consolidated in Alkin and King's series in the American Journal of Evaluation (2016–2019) and the fifth edition of Patton's Utilization-Focused Evaluation (2022). The practical result is visible in almost every terms of reference: "learning agendas", "learning questions", "pause and reflect" sessions, "adaptive management" and a "learning partner" role sitting alongside or instead of the external evaluator.
Frameworks and tools
- USAID's Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) framework and maturity matrix
- MEAL (monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning) as institutionalised by CRS, Save the Children and the Core Humanitarian Standard
- utilisation-focused evaluation
- "evaluative thinking" as a teachable competence (Buckley, Archibald, Hargraves and Trochim, 2015)
- learning agendas as a formal planning instrument (mandated for US federal agencies by the 2018 Evidence Act)
Vocabulary to recognise
- MEL
- MEAL
- learning agenda
- learning partner
- pause and reflect
- evaluative thinking
- evidence use and influence
- feedback loops
- results agenda
- counter-bureaucracy
- reporting burden
Live controversies
Critics argue that "learning" rhetoric can hide weak accountability, and that logframes persist stubbornly beneath theory-of-change language (Ringhofer and Kohlweg's 2019 review found ToC has not displaced the logical framework). Others note that the learning literature is heavy on prescription and light on evidence that learning-oriented MEL actually changes decisions.
The 2025 collapse of USAID's learning infrastructure (the Learning Lab, CLA guidance, the Development Experience Clearinghouse) was read by many as the results-versus-learning debate being overtaken by the raw politics of aid.
Further reading
- Andrew Natsios, The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development, Center for Global Development, 2010 — the origin of "obsessive measurement disorder".
- Duncan Green, review of The Politics of Evidence and Results in International Development, LSE International Development blog, 2015.
- Craig Valters, Theories of Change: Time for a radical approach to learning in development, ODI, 2015.
- Duncan Green, Book review: Navigation by Judgment by Dan Honig, From Poverty to Power, 2018.
- Lisa Ringhofer and Karin Kohlweg, Has the Theory of Change established itself as the better alternative to the Logical Framework Approach?, Progress in Development Studies, 2019.
- Marvin Alkin and Jean King, The Historical Development of Evaluation Use, American Journal of Evaluation, 2016, and Jean King and Marvin Alkin, The Centrality of Use, American Journal of Evaluation, 2019.
- Michael Quinn Patton, Evaluation Use Theory, Practice, and Future Research: Reflections on the Alkin and King AJE Series, American Journal of Evaluation, 2020.
- Jane Buckley, Thomas Archibald, Monica Hargraves and William Trochim, Defining and Teaching Evaluative Thinking, American Journal of Evaluation, 2015.
- USAID Learning Lab, CLA Toolkit — availability has been intermittent since 2025; the OECD's summary of the CLA approach is a stable alternative.
- EvalForward community discussion, Reporting and supporting evaluation use and influence, 2020 — practitioners on shorter reports and co-drafted recommendations.