Scott Chaplowe

January, 2022

This post is an opinion piece published in journal, Evaluation, with a collection of other contributions in the article, What should evaluation learn from COP 26? Views of evaluation practitioners. It responds to the journal’s editor, Eliot Stern, who asked a group of leading evaluation practitioners about lessons from the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) for evaluation practice.

The 26th episode of the UN Climate Change Conference (AKA COP26) has ended up rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. But time is running out, underscored this year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, backed by 13 Nobel laureates, which advanced the infamous Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight – the closest humanity has ever been to total annihilation.

The bottom line is that business-as-usual (BAU) incremental change is not going to cut it. We need radical, global systems transformation if we are to climb out of this hole before it caves in and buries us - acknowledging  some casualties are already entombed. But the COPs are largely  poster children for incremental change. The alarm clock keeps on going off – from extreme weather and heat events, to drought, firestorms, and floods – but rather than wake up and act, power brokers reach over and tap the snooze button.

This is not to dismiss the utility of the COPs and the attention they bring to the climate emergency. I applaud their science-based advocacy, incredibly patient diplomacy, and cumulative accomplishments. In the end, we will need a multiplicity of effort and nudges to tip and topple the broken state of affairs.

But it is not enough. The climate crisis is a meta-driver of problematic change, with multiplier effects exacerbating existing problems. Global warming and concurrent environmental degradation affect the planet’s habitability and natural resource base needed to sustain humanity, which stresses social systems with the poor, marginalized and most vulnerable bearing a disproportionate burden. One UN report warns that the world is at risk of “climate apartheid,” where the wealthy escape the impacts of extreme heat and global warming while the rest of the world suffers. To its credit, COP26 focused considerable attention on the stark paradox and disparity between wealthy countries’ contribution to global warming and the disproportionate harm caused to less-wealthy countries least responsible.

As a profession in the business of assessment and advising decision makers and stakeholders, evaluators need to stand up and act, as others have, if we are to help avert the looming environmental catastrophe and resultant near-term collapse of society under a BAU scenario. I identify three interrelated, standout opportunities for evaluation engagement.

First, I see much promise in social tipping points to leverage transformative change. This concept builds on the understanding that social change is unpredictable and nonlinear. rather than straightforward. Just as natural scientists use tipping points to refer to instances in environmental systems when a critical threshold is reached leading to a new state, social scientists have adopted social tipping points for when awareness and momentum accumulates beneath the surface until an incident triggers cascading change in society. Attention on the topic is increasing, reflected in the conference theme for the Transformations 2021 Conference earlier this year: “Enabling Positive Tipping Points in an Uncertain World.”

The landmark 1987 Montreal Protocol illustrates a positive social tipping point prompted by the threat of the expanding ozone hole in the atmosphere due to the consumption of ozone depleting substances (ODS). It is the only UN treaty ratified by every country on Earth, resulting in the phase-out of 98% of ODS, reducing the size of the ozone hole to the smallest on record by 2019.

One significant barrier to positive social tipping points is the widespread use of disinformation to purposefully disseminate false, misleading, unsubstantiated, and harmful information. For nearly 30 years the fossil fuel industry has orchestrated a well-funded disinformation campaign to mislead the public and discredit the science about the threat of climate change, (e.g., The Climate Deception Dossiers). Last summer InfluenceMap reported that 25 fossil-fuel companies funded an ad campaign on Facebook viewed 431 million times in 2020 alone, promoting  the climate-friendliness of the industry, fossil gas as green, and disinformation on the likelihood of reaching net zero by 2050.

As a profession that extols the importance of reliable and credible evidence-based data, evaluation is uniquely positioned to counter the spread of misinformation. Evaluators have a responsibility to speak truth to power and champion science, evidence-based data, and facts beyond the findings of any particular evaluation.

Second, evaluation needs to rise above the marketplace and return to its core task of valuing and judging to uphold its core principles to serve the common good. Evaluation is subject to the same political economic forces that affect climate change, and ultimately shape what it evaluates. More often than not, the evaluation marketplace consigns evaluation to a descriptive, tick-box, accounting exercise that steers clear of judgment rather than providing judgment to inform decision making. Michael Scriven refers to this as “valuephobia,” - paradoxical because it undermines the core tenets he identifies for evaluation: “to determine merit, worth, value, or significance.”

Third, evaluation like other fields and disciplines needs to take a public position on climate change and related complex environmental and social issues. For instance, in the lead-up to COP26, more than 200 health journals worldwide announced they were publishing a statement calling on leaders to take emergency action on climate change to protect health.

In the field of evaluation, the landmark 2019 Prague Declaration on Evaluation for Transformational Change from IDEAS is an exceptional example of evaluators taking a stand, calling upon evaluation to confront today’s existential threats. It is also encouraging to see the increasing attention on the Anthropocene and today’s complex challenges in journals for evaluation (such as this one), VOPE conferences, and vibrant evaluation communities of practice such as Blue Marble Evaluation and Footprint Evaluation. Likewise, it is promising to see the surge of attention on decolonizing evaluation and the efficacy of traditional, non-Western, and Indigenous evaluations that point to holistic analytical evaluation approaches to today’s complex challenges.

Ultimately, evaluation’s tipping potential to help leverage transformational change relates to a multiplicity of interconnected factors that are emergent and unfolding unpredictably. I am reminded of the political scientist, Erica Chenoweth’s 3.5% rule , who researched social movements and protest. The rule postulates that the status quo – BAU – cannot withstand a challenge of 3.5% of the population without either accommodating the movement or collapsing. I see promise within the field of evaluation for a 3.5% effect to transform evaluation to help transform the world.