What changed
Complexity thinking moved from the margins of evaluation theory into donor policy. Michael Quinn Patton's developmental evaluation was extended into Principles-Focused Evaluation (2018) and Blue Marble Evaluation (2020), the latter arguing that evaluators should operate at global and planetary scale rather than the project unit.
USAID formalised "complexity-aware monitoring" in a 2016 discussion note (updated 2021) with a menu of approaches: sentinel indicators, stakeholder feedback, process monitoring of impacts, Most Significant Change and outcome harvesting.
Governance reformers converged on similar ground from a different direction — the Doing Development Differently manifesto (2014), Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock, Building State Capability, 2017) and the Thinking and Working Politically community — and demanded MEL that could support rapid iteration rather than fidelity to a fixed plan.
ODI's "adaptive rigour" framing (Wild and Buffardi, 2019) became the standard rejoinder to the charge that adaptive programmes escape accountability. A distinct "systems change evaluation" strand grew alongside, with its own principles from the AEA Systems in Evaluation topical interest group and a New Directions for Evaluation issue in 2021.
Frameworks and tools
- Developmental evaluation
- principles-focused evaluation (the GUIDE test: guiding, useful, inspiring, developmental, evaluable)
- complexity-aware monitoring
- sentinel indicators
- causal link monitoring
- adaptive management and "adaptive rigour"
- PDIA
- systems mapping
- Mark Cabaj's inquiry framework for evaluating systems change
- the AEA Systems in Evaluation TIG principles (interrelationships, perspectives, boundaries, dynamics)
Vocabulary to recognise
- Complexity-aware
- emergence
- adaptive management
- adaptive rigour
- systemic evaluation
- transformation
- Blue Marble
- sentinel indicator
- problem-driven
- "thinking and working politically" (TWP)
- "good enough" evidence
Live controversies
Whether adaptive MEL trades away accountability and rigour; the thinness of evidence that adaptive management actually delivers better results (Duncan Green's repeated question "what makes it work in practice?"); the loose use of "complexity" as a label for anything hard to measure; and the tendency to call incremental projects "transformational" (see also section 10). The 2025 Evaluation review by Gates and colleagues of 102 publications on systems-change evaluation found power relations strikingly under-examined.
Further reading
- USAID, Discussion Note: Complexity-Aware Monitoring, 2016/2021 (BetterEvaluation mirror).
- Leni Wild and Anne Buffardi, Making adaptive rigour work, ODI, 2019.
- Tiina Pasanen and Inka Barnett, Supporting adaptive management: monitoring and evaluation tools and approaches, ODI Working Paper 569, 2019.
- Duncan Green, What makes adaptive management actually work in practice?, From Poverty to Power, 2019.
- Thomas Aston, Chris Roche, Marta Schaaf and Sue Cant, Monitoring and evaluation for thinking and working politically, Evaluation, 2022 (open PDF).
- The DDD Manifesto, Doing Development Differently community, hosted at Harvard's Building State Capability programme; Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, Building State Capability, Oxford University Press, 2017 (open access).
- Michael Quinn Patton, What is Essential in Developmental Evaluation?, American Journal of Evaluation, 2016.
- Robert Picciotto, book review of Blue Marble Evaluation, American Journal of Evaluation, 2020 — a critical peer reading.
- Emily Gates et al., Introducing systems- and complexity-informed evaluation, New Directions for Evaluation no. 170, 2021.
- Emily Gates, Pablo Vidueira et al., A critical, integrative review on evaluating systems change and transformation, Part One: 2011–2021, Evaluation, 2025.
- Tilman Hertz, Eva Brattander and Loretta Rose, Complexity-Aware Monitoring and Evaluation, Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 2021.
- Mark Cabaj, Evaluating Systems Change Results: An Inquiry Framework, Tamarack Institute, 2019.
- Bob Williams, What kind of systemic evaluator are you?, AEA365.