Rethinking the Roles of Evaluation in Learning how to Solve ‘Wicked’ Problems: The Case of Anticipatory Techniques used to Support Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Many of the most pressing policy and social challenges of the modern era are widely viewed to be ‘wicked’ problems, that is, complex, largely intractable, contested problems. A good example is climate change mitigation and adaptation. The dual context for this article is: the recent increase in evaluative questions being asked by practitioners and policymakers who are seeking to address wicked socio-environmental problems (like climate change); and the recognition that such problems and related interventions present major challenges to evaluative inquiry. To effectively answer these evaluative questions, both practitioners and policymakers need the assistance of evaluators who recognise the limitations of traditional accountability-oriented evaluation and adequately understand the complexity of programs, the contexts in which they are embedded, and the socio-environmental problems they seek to address. This article reviews and builds on discussion of wicked environmental and policy problems in the evaluation literature to consider the evaluation challenges (and associated guiding principles) and potential roles for evaluative inquiry. The article argues that evaluations of interventions into wicked problems should be grounded in the realist paradigm. Drawing on the review and this theory, four roles for evaluative inquiry are identified: (1) testing and refining transferable intervention theories; (2) enabling learning (rather than demonstrating accountability); (3) providing decision support; and (4) mapping program complexity and prompting adequate consideration of complexity.