What changed
Culturally responsive evaluation (Stafford Hood, Rodney Hopson) was already established in the United States by 2016; what changed afterwards was the shift from adapting methods to context toward explicit critiques of power, epistemology and ownership. Three movements matured. Made in Africa Evaluation, championed by the African Evaluation Association and theorised by Bagele Chilisa, gained a working definition (2021), a special collection in the African Evaluation Journal and a handbook (2025).
Indigenous evaluation was formalised globally through EvalIndigenous (an EvalPartners network founded in 2015) and a 2018 New Directions for Evaluation issue edited by Fiona Cram and colleagues. The Equitable Evaluation Framework of Jara Dean-Coffey's Equitable Evaluation Initiative (2017) reframed philanthropic evaluation around three principles and a set of "orthodoxies" to be questioned.
The 2023 Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation special issue Decolonizing Evaluation: Towards a Fifth Paradigm and Donna Mertens's proposal of a fifth branch on the evaluation theory tree mark the academic high-water mark. On the donor side, USAID's 2021 localisation targets (25 per cent of funding to local partners by 2025, half of programming "locally led" by 2030) produced a new indicator, a measurement debate and, by 2025, a documented shortfall before the agency itself was dismantled.
Frameworks and tools
- Culturally responsive and equitable evaluation (CREE)
- the Equitable Evaluation Framework
- Made in Africa Evaluation and the AfrEA standards
- Indigenous evaluation frameworks
- feminist evaluation and feminist participatory action research
- the UN "Leave No One Behind" lens in SDG evaluation
- USAID's locally-led indicator
Vocabulary to recognise
- Decolonising
- epistemic justice
- epistemic violence
- CREE
- power-sharing
- shift the power
- locally led
- LNOB
- fifth paradigm
- reflexivity
- positionality
Live controversies
Whether decolonisation is substantive or performative ("decolonial reflexivity" versus a paragraph in the inception report); tensions between equity-centred approaches and the independence and rigour norms of the profession; whether localisation should be measured by funding flows or by who holds decision power; principal–agent problems in localisation (Ranil Dissanayake at CGD); and the 2024–25 political backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion in the United States, which pushed some evaluators to rebrand equity work and put federal equity-focused evaluation funding at risk.
Further reading
- Bagele Chilisa and Donna Mertens, Indigenous Made in Africa Evaluation Frameworks: Addressing Epistemic Violence and Contributing to Social Transformation, American Journal of Evaluation, 2021.
- Eddah Omosa et al., Towards defining and advancing 'Made in Africa Evaluation', African Evaluation Journal, 2021; Ian Goldman et al., Decolonising national evaluation systems, African Evaluation Journal, 2024.
- Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, special issue Decolonizing Evaluation: Towards a Fifth Paradigm, 2023.
- Jara Dean-Coffey, What's Race Got to Do With It? Equity and Philanthropic Evaluation Practice, American Journal of Evaluation, 2018; Equitable Evaluation Initiative, The Equitable Evaluation Framework.
- Fiona Cram et al., Editors' notes: A Stepping Stone in Indigenous Evaluation, New Directions for Evaluation no. 159, 2018, and An Emergent Typology for Indigenous Evaluation Frameworks, New Directions for Evaluation, 2025.
- Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment, Origins.
- Kristin Crupi and Naomi Godden, Feminist Evaluation Using Feminist Participatory Action Research, American Journal of Evaluation, 2024.
- Zenda Ofir and Deborah Rugg, Transforming Evaluation for Times of Global Transformation, American Journal of Evaluation, 2021.
- Michael Igoe, Inside USAID's new 'locally led' indicator, Devex, 2023; Elissa Miolene, What's inside USAID's latest localization report?, Devex, 2025; Ranil Dissanayake, The Challenge of Localization, Center for Global Development, 2024.
- Elizabeth Bishop, Is CREE the Same as DEI Under Erasure?, AEA365, 2024.
- Decolonising international development evaluation: rethinking OECD DAC evaluation criteria from a decolonial perspective, Development in Practice, 2025.