What changed
The 2015 International Year of Evaluation produced EvalPartners' Global Evaluation Agenda 2016–2020, organised around enabling environments, institutional capacities, individual capacities and their inter-linkages, followed by the Eval4Action campaign (2020) linking evaluation to the SDG "decade of action" and to Voluntary National Reviews.
UNDP's National Evaluation Capacities conference series and the World Bank-hosted Global Evaluation Initiative, with its gLOCAL Evaluation Week (since 2019), institutionalised the "national evaluation systems" agenda. Normative infrastructure was overhauled: UNEG revised its Norms and Standards (2016, again 2025) and issued Ethical Guidelines with a mandatory pledge (2020).
The decade's most consequential single change is the 2019 revision of the OECD DAC evaluation criteria, which added coherence as a sixth criterion, reworded impact and sustainability and — crucially — introduced two principles for use: apply thoughtfully, and let context drive.
Professionalisation advanced through the AEA Evaluator Competencies (2018), the European Evaluation Society's capabilities framework and Voluntary Evaluator Peer Review, and the Canadian Credentialed Evaluator designation, still the only credential of its kind.
In Europe, the Commission's Better Regulation agenda embedded ex-post evaluation through the "evaluate first" principle and the 2021 guidelines, while the Recovery and Resilience Facility's "milestones and targets" model generated a sharp argument about whether it is performance-based at all.
Frameworks and tools
- The six OECD DAC criteria and the 2021 Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully guidance
- UNEG Norms and Standards and Ethical Guidelines
- AEA competencies
- EES capabilities framework and VEPR
- national evaluation policies
- EU Better Regulation toolbox
- RRF milestones and targets
Vocabulary to recognise
- Coherence
- thoughtful application
- evaluation ecosystem
- national evaluation system
- VOPE (voluntary organisation for professional evaluation)
- gLOCAL
- credentialing
- evaluate first
- milestones and targets
Live controversies
The criteria as tick-box template versus thinking tool (the 2019 revision was explicitly a response to the former); Northern dominance of norm-setting and the decolonial critique of the DAC criteria (see section 5); the accountability-versus-learning trade-off in EU cohesion-policy evaluation systems, which Kupiec, Wojtowicz and Olejniczak typologise across six Central and Eastern European countries; and the European Court of Auditors' verdict that the RRF's overall performance "cannot be measured" because milestones track inputs and outputs rather than results.
Further reading
- OECD DAC, Better Criteria for Better Evaluation, 2019, and Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully, 2021; Riccardo Polastro, Better criteria for better evaluation?, UNICEF, 2022.
- Thomaz Chianca, The OECD/DAC Criteria for International Development Evaluations: An Assessment and Ideas for Improvement, Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 2008 — the critique that motivated the revision.
- UNEG, Norms and Standards for Evaluation, 2016/2025, and Ethical Guidelines for Evaluation, 2020.
- EvalPartners, Global Evaluation Agenda 2020 stocktaking summary, 2021; Eval4Action; UNDP IEO, National Evaluation Capacities; Global Evaluation Initiative, gLOCAL Evaluation Week.
- Jean King and Laurie Stevahn, Presenting the 2018 AEA Evaluator Competencies, New Directions for Evaluation no. 168, 2020; EES, Evaluation Capabilities Framework and Voluntary Evaluator Peer Review.
- Peter Dahler-Larsen and Adiilah Boodhoo, Evaluation culture and good governance: Is there a link?, Evaluation, 2019.
- Tomasz Kupiec, Dominika Wojtowicz and Karol Olejniczak, Structures and functions of complex evaluation systems: comparison of six CEE countries, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 2023; Czech Evaluation Society, Evaluation culture and evaluation capacities in Central and Eastern Europe, Evaluační teorie a praxe, 2017.
- European Commission, Better Regulation Guidelines SWD(2021)305; EPRS, What is new in the Commission's 2021 Better Regulation Guidelines?, 2022.
- Zsolt Darvas, Lennard Welslau and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, The EU Recovery and Resilience Facility falls short against performance-based funding standards, Bruegel, 2023; eucrim, ECA: Overall performance of EU's Recovery Fund cannot be measured, 2023.