Designing, implementing and embedding transformation-focused evaluation: A framework and insights from a regional food system change initiative

Transformation in societal systems such as food systems is required to overcome global crises. An essential part of stewarding desirable transformations is for organizations and initiatives to develop understanding of whether such transformations are occurring, their contributions (both potential and actual) to transformation, and the impacts of transformations already underway, as well as maintaining capacity for agility and adaptation. These are fundamentally issues of evaluation—the process of assigning quality, value or importance to something—that enables learning about transformations. However, the movement towards transformation-focused evaluation is a relatively recent chapter in the evolution of the evaluation field, a major and challenging departure from mainstream evaluation practice, and lacking in case studies of its design and application. Here we provide a rare insight into the collaborative process of designing, and starting to implement and embed, transformation-focused evaluation in the context of a large regional-scale food system transformation initiative, Food for the Future in North Yorkshire. We present the transformation-focused evaluation and learning system designed for the initiative, which shows how core evaluation questions, goals and guides, and different forms of feedback, sense-making and learning could be integrated and reinforce each other within an ecosystem of actors striving to support food system transformation. We discuss the innovations, progress and challenges in the framework and its application, as well as our lessons more broadly for the growing number of organizations and initiatives interested in using transformation-focused evaluation to support large-scale system transformation.