Leadership-evaluation partnership: Infusing systems principles and complexity concepts for a transformational alliance

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. This chapter will tell the story of how the Global Alliance incorporated systems thinking, complexity understandings, and principles-focused developmental evaluation into systems transformation work through the reflective practice of the co-authors, Ruth Richardson, the Global Alliance Executive Director, and Michael Quinn Patton, the developmental evaluation consultant to the Global Alliance