7 takeaways: How can evaluation be a force for peace and resilience building amidst global instability?

The second Eval4Action dialogue, honouring the International Day of Peace 2025 explored how evaluation can foster peace and resilience among global instability and humanitarian crises. Panelists Mohib Iqbal, Hur Hassnain, and Kai Brand-Jacobsen, along with moderator Silvia Salinas Mulder, shared their expertise on how to make evaluation a more equitable and effective tool in complex environments.

In a powerful moment, Agnes Nyaga of UN Human Rights passed the EvalTorch to the moderator, symbolizing a shared vision and action for the future of evaluation. The session challenged the notion that evaluation's traditional focus on accountability and learning is sufficient, with an audience poll revealing overwhelming agreement that it is not. The conversation explored how to empower evaluation as a peacebuilding tool, not just a way to measure performance. Central to this is expanding adaptive and locally-led evaluation approaches, and putting ethical considerations at the forefront of evaluation practices.

Seven quick takeaways from the dialogue

1. Accountability and learning must be actively practiced: Evaluation's traditional roles of accountability and learning are more vital than ever, but they are often not implemented effectively. For evaluation to be a force for peace, we must rigorously hold actors accountable for their actions—or inactions—and create meaningful systems for learning. We need to ensure that evaluation findings are used to improve future peacebuilding efforts.

2. Move beyond micro-intervention level evaluations to systematic, transformative evaluations: Global issues like conflicts, climate change, and systemic fragility cannot be solved with micro-level, project-focused evaluations. Evaluation must adopt a transformational lens that connects local insights with global systems and vice versa. The unprecedented increase in violent conflicts and the systemic nature of crises demand that evaluators engage with the scale and urgency of the transformation needed, challenging rigid criteria that can miss the nuances of complex contexts.

3. Peace is more than just the absence of violence: True peace is a lifelong journey of dignity, trust, and inclusion - and addressing underlying root causes and preventing or transforming conflicts effectively by peaceful means. Evaluation must go beyond simply counting outputs and activities to assess whether interventions foster these elements across generations. This requires a deep understanding of local and institutional values, norms and culture, and what matters to them the most. Evaluations should not be extractive but participatory, co-owned by communities who can define what peace means to them and use the findings to drive their own change.

4. Harness evidence from diverse sources: Effective evaluation in conflict-affected states requires a broader understanding of evidence. This includes not only cumulative evidence from past studies but also the vital knowledge of practitioners and the deeply-held insights, culture and experiences of affected communities. By drawing from all these sources, evaluators can better understand what works, how, and why, and use this knowledge to inform national and international policies.

5. Strengthen authentic ownership, embedded capacities and locally-led approaches: The operational model for evaluation and learning in contexts of fragility, conflict, and violence must shift to a local and nationally-led approaches, and to taking serious investment in and supporting capacities and ownership within communities and countries affected. Communities and countries impacted by violence and conflict should be supported to develop effective peacebuilding, conflict transformation and violence prevention capacities - including evaluation as part of this. More work should be done through local and national evaluators and local and nationally-led evaluation processes. The evaluator can also take on more of a facilitative role - to facilitate ‘sense making’ and learning with communities and stakeholders involved.  It is crucial to challenge the notion that "experts" from afar have the answers, and instead, empower local and national capabilities to lead the difficult work of data collection and insight generation.

6. Prioritize ethical responsibility and safeguarding: When working in volatile contexts, no evaluation tool or accountability measure should ever supersede the safety and security of local people. This includes third-party monitors and enumerators who often face the most significant risks. Evaluators must prioritize a duty of care to these individuals. Where relevant, tools like remote sensing can also be used to limit risk. Evaluations in contexts of conflict, fragility and violence should also ensure trauma-informed practice.

7. Going beyond outcomes and impact and towards value for money and use of resources:  In a world where funding is increasingly scarce, evaluation must go beyond assessing outcomes and impact to assess value for money and investment, and identify which interventions and approaches can really achieve meaningful change - strengthening and supporting peace and overcoming instability and violence. Studies have shown that peacebuilding activities, when done well, can yield a significant return on investment—in some cases, as high as $16 for every $1 invested. By evaluating cost-effectiveness, the evaluation community can demonstrate the immense public value of peacebuilding efforts and justify continued investment in them.

   
   

About the #Eval4Action Future of Evaluation dialogues

The Eval4Action Future of Evaluation dialogues are a series of forward-looking discussions that explore innovative and adaptive approaches to evaluation. Designed to make evaluation more influential in a rapidly changing and complex world, these dialogues bring together a diverse range of voices—from experts to young evaluators—to share knowledge and highlight ways to future-proof the field of evaluation. Each monthly dialogue is aligned with an international action day, ensuring the conversations are timely and relevant to a global discourse. 

The next dialogue, “How can evaluation shape a future-fit United Nations?” will take place on 23 October 2025. Learn more 

This article was written with AI support with human authors in the lead.