Principle 3: Transformative Engagement

Join us as we explore the new directions for Utilization-Focused Evaluation through Blue Marble Evaluation.

This month, we will be providing a space for Q&A with Michael Quinn Patton, founder of Blue Marble Evaluation, as well as time for BME members to connect with one another. We will also talk about how the Blue Marble Evaluation community might collaborate to contribute to the upcoming American Evaluation Association conference call for proposals. 

Join us as we explore the new directions for Utilization-Focused Evaluation through Blue Marble Evaluation. These monthly gatherings will be less one-way webinars and more conversations, case examples, fishbowl-style consulting and opportunities to learn and connect.

Gatherings will take place on the Third Thursday of the month at 9am CST / 3pm UTC.

Click here to register.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food provides a case exemplar of incorporating systems thinking, complexity understandings, and developmental evaluation into systems transformation work. This trans-formational engagement is not just rhetoric but is deeply embedded as the focus of the Global Alliance’s ongoing work. It is, importantly, predicated on in-depth and long-term cocreation and collaboration between alliance leadership and an independent external evaluator.

Evaluation that supports social, ecological, and governance systems change and transformation raises ethical questions about what and whose worldviews do and should ground evaluative processes. This article illustrates one approach to ethical analysis within a case study of the first phase of an initiative to co-create a monitoring, evaluation, and learning system. The case drew on the principles of Blue Marble Evaluation in partnership with local staff and Indigenous leaders of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative.

Description: Blue Marble refers to the iconic image of the Earth from space without borders or boundaries, a whole Earth perspective. Blue Marble Evaluation consists of principles and criteria for evaluating transformational initiatives aimed at a more equitable and sustainable world.

本書では、「SDGs時代の評価─価値を引き出し、変容を促す営み」と題して、筆者らのミクロ実践からマクロ政策までの幅広い知見のもとで、SDGs時代の評価に関わる考察が行われてきた。各章のキーワードは、『SDGs時代における評価概念のシフト』、『評価における社会変容と個人変容の連動』、『国際協力の協働パートナーシップ』、『通域的な学び』、『発展的評価』、『ブルーマーブル評価』であった。そして、これらの論考には、価値をめぐる協働と学びの取り組みがあり、価値の問い直し、価値の意味づけ、価値の共創の取り組みへの主体的なコミットメントが見られる。

When we set out to create the Blue Marble Evaluation network, it is safe to say that we did not really know what we were doing. We received a lot of great advice and tremendous support from the McKnight Foundation and from many of our members and friends.

Several members of the BME network will be presenting the following session at the American Evaluation Conference: 

Under a massive and slowly spinning earthen globe in the SSE Hydro in Glasgow Scotland, I joined a meditation circle of 12 people led by two monks from Plum Village Monastery in France. The Monastery, founded by Thich Nhat Han, has become a spiritual lifeline for several of the leaders of CoP26. This makes sense when you consider the stakes of the event well named as the “last best chance” to get it right.