For years, we have invested in training evaluators, improving methodologies, organising conferences and strengthening institutions. Yet perhaps we have paid far less attention to something both simpler and more difficult: who brings all these efforts together once we return home?
A few days ago, I was talking with a colleague about evaluation. At some point, our conversation turned to the national evaluation association.
“There have been virtually no activities for nine years,” she told me.
I have not systematically examined the history of that particular association, so I take her comment for what it is: an observation, not evidence about the association itself. Still, her words stayed with me, perhaps because they point to a much wider problem.
While the international evaluation community organises increasingly sophisticated conferences, global initiatives, webinars, working groups and professional gatherings, what happens at country level between conferences?
Who keeps evaluators connected? Who brings together those who produce evaluations and those who should be commissioning them? Who connects government, universities, civil society, consultants, emerging evaluators and international organisations? Who sustains a national conversation about quality, ethics, professionalisation and evaluation use?
Perhaps we have devoted considerable attention to developing evaluation capacities, but far too little to developing the collective capacity of evaluation systems themselves.
Plenty of capacity, but is there a system?
This is hardly a new question.
Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs) have expanded considerably over recent decades. EvalPartners explicitly recognised their role in national evaluation capacity development, not only in strengthening evaluation professionals but also in influencing decision-makers and fostering enabling environments for evaluation (Kosheleva & Segone, 2013).
Yet the underlying problem appears to persist.
A study of African VOPEs revealed a telling paradox: while evaluation associations have proliferated, many continue to face significant financial and human resource constraints. The authors argue that these associations should become central pillars of national evaluation systems, strengthening both the supply of and demand for evaluation (Fish et al., 2022).
A more recent comparative study of evaluation associations in Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia and Uganda identifies recurring funding challenges and highlights something particularly interesting: professionalisation does not follow a single, universal pathway. Associations must continually negotiate their independence, relationships with governments, engagement with international development cooperation, and the tensions between global models and national realities (Jersild, 2026).
In other words, having an evaluation association does not necessarily mean having an active evaluation community. Nor does having plenty of evaluators mean having an evaluation system.
That should sound familiar.
From developing capacities to developing systems
For a long time, much of evaluation capacity development focused on individuals: training courses, workshops, methodologies and professional competencies.
The literature has gradually moved towards a more systemic understanding. Klier et al. (2022) argue that capacity development requires an understanding of the interrelationships within evaluation systems. Williams et al. (2024) make a particularly useful distinction between capacity — possessing knowledge and skills — and capability — having the institutional, political and social space needed to put them into practice.
We can train a hundred evaluators. But if nobody commissions evaluations, those capacities remain underused.
We can strengthen evaluation supply. But if evaluations are not used, the system still fails to fulfil its purpose.
We can stimulate demand. But if domestic evaluation capacity is weak, evaluations will largely end up being conducted by external providers.
And we can improve both supply and demand, yet if the actors involved barely interact, we will still be left with relatively competent individual components operating within a fragmented system.
The recently developed National Evaluation Capacities Index (INCE) is particularly interesting because it examines precisely these interdependencies. Its framework considers five dimensions: institutional structures, evaluation supply, quality, multi-stakeholder spaces and evaluation use (Klier & Sanz, 2026).
These are not five separate compartments.
Together, they can create a vicious circle.
Weak demand generates few professional opportunities. Limited opportunities undermine evaluation supply. Weak supply can compromise quality. Inconsistent evaluation quality erodes trust and discourages use. Reduced use, in turn, further weakens demand.
But the reverse is also possible.
Greater interaction among stakeholders → better understanding and stronger demand → more opportunities → stronger evaluation supply → higher quality → greater trust → increased use → stronger legitimacy for evaluation → even greater demand.
A virtuous circle.
The question is: who helps set it in motion?
Perhaps we have been looking at evaluation associations the wrong way
This is where my hypothesis comes in.
Perhaps a national evaluation association should not primarily be understood as an organisation representing evaluators.
Instead, we might see it as a potential form of relational infrastructure within the national evaluation system.
Its principal function would not be to organise an annual conference. Or deliver training courses. Or maintain a membership directory.
It would be to connect.
To connect supply and demand. Experienced and emerging evaluators. Government and civil society. Academia and practice. International standards and local knowledge. Those who produce evidence and those who make decisions.
This fundamentally changes how we think about developing the capacities of these associations.
A struggling association does not simply need better statutes, a new executive board or more members. It needs the ability to convene, connect, build trust, facilitate collective learning and sustain relationships over time.
And this is where evaluation capacity development meets another field we have explored repeatedly in TripleAD: collective action.
Kania and Kramer (2011) argued that complex problems are unlikely to be resolved through isolated interventions. Collective impact requires a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication and some form of supporting infrastructure to sustain collaboration. The framework subsequently evolved towards an approach less focused on management and more attentive to learning, relationships, systems change and equity (Cabaj & Weaver, 2016; Kania et al., 2022).
Seen from this perspective, there is something rather ironic about our situation.
We are trying to build national evaluation systems through capacity development interventions that all too often remain fragmented themselves.
Every organisation trains its own evaluators. Every agency launches its own initiative. Every project funds its own workshop. Every network organises its own conference. We are all strengthening capacities.
And the system may remain weak.
From global conferences to an ordinary Tuesday afternoon
I am not questioning the value of global conferences. They matter. They enable knowledge exchange, foster professional identity and connect experiences that might otherwise remain isolated.
The problem arises when we confuse bringing people together for three days with building institutional relationships that last ten years.
A professional community does not exist simply because its members occasionally meet at an international conference.
It exists when, after returning to Tunisia, Senegal, Peru, Nepal or Spain, they remain connected; when national institutions recognise a shared space for dialogue; when emerging evaluators can find mentors; when those commissioning evaluations know where to find domestic expertise; when universities, governments and professionals discuss standards; when difficult conversations about quality can take place; and when the community is strong enough to survive a change in the association’s leadership.
That last point is particularly important.
If an association functions only while an exceptionally committed individual is willing to keep it alive, and then disappears when that person runs out of energy, perhaps we never really built an institution.
We built a dependency on leadership.
And that, too, is a capacity problem.
The missing middle
In TripleAD, I have been returning to the problem of fragmentation for quite some time.
Back in 2020, I argued that a national evaluation system is not simply a collection of institutions and individuals, but also the policies, procedures and relationships that connect them. When the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) was launched, I also warned that, without genuine collective impact, an initiative intended to reduce fragmentation might inadvertently add yet another layer to it.
Six years later, GEI continues to emphasise systemic approaches, local ownership, long-term collaboration and the need to reduce fragmentation.
Perhaps we still need to pay much greater attention to what happens in between.
We have strong global organisations.
We have national institutions.
We have individual evaluators.
But what we need between them is connective tissue.
National evaluation associations could provide part of that connective tissue, although they are certainly not the only organisations capable of playing such a role.
And that is precisely why we may need to stop treating them as occasional beneficiaries of capacity development initiatives and start recognising them as strategic actors in the development of national evaluation systems.
This would also mean changing how we support them: fewer isolated workshops and more sustained institutional support; fewer events and more investment in relational infrastructure; less dependence on individual leaders and more distributed governance; fewer stand-alone organisational projects and more shared national agendas; less emphasis on counting participants and more attention to whether connections, trust, supply, demand, quality and evaluation use are actually improving.
In other words, we need to apply to evaluation capacity development itself the very principles we have spent years recommending to others.
Because perhaps the most revealing thing about a national evaluation association that has remained inactive for years is not that the association has a problem.
Perhaps it is that the system that should need it has learnt to function without it.
And if that is the case, the uncomfortable question is no longer how to revitalise our national evaluation associations.
It is something more fundamental:
How can we expect to build strong national evaluation systems when the people and institutions within them have so few structures through which to act collectively?
References
Cabaj, M., & Weaver, L. (2016). Collective impact 3.0: An evolving framework for community change. Tamarack Institute.
Fish, T., Dlakavu, A., Amisi, M., & Masvaure, S. (2022). Transforming voluntary organisations for professional evaluation into central pillars of national evaluation systems. African Evaluation Journal, 10(1), a608. https://doi.org/10.4102/aej.v10i1.608
Jersild, A. C. (2026). Evaluation associations as catalysts for the professionalization of evaluation practice: A comparative case study of Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia and Uganda [Doctoral dissertation, Western Michigan University].
Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2011). Collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 9(1), 36–41. https://doi.org/10.48558/5900-KN19
Kania, J., Williams, J., Schmitz, P., Brady, S., Kramer, M., & Juster, J. S. (2022). Centering equity in collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 20(1), 38–45.
Klier, S. D., Nawrotzki, R. J., Salas-Rodríguez, N., Harten, S., Keating, C. B., & Katina, P. F. (2022). Grounding evaluation capacity development in systems theory. Evaluation, 28(2), 231–251. https://doi.org/10.1177/13563890221088871
Klier, S. D., & Sanz, J. C. (2026). National evaluation systems under review: Comparing existing assessment tools and introducing the National Evaluation Capacities Index (INCE) (DEval Discussion Paper 2/2026). German Institute for Development Evaluation. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19693722
Kosheleva, N., & Segone, M. (2013). EvalPartners: Facilitating the development of a new model of voluntary organization for professional evaluation to support the development of national evaluation capacities. American Journal of Evaluation, 34(4), 568–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098214013493656
Rodríguez-Ariza, C. (2020). “Capacidad y Sistema” Nacional de Evaluación en la Agenda 2030 [National evaluation capacity and systems in the 2030 Agenda]. TripleAD: Aprendiendo a Aprender para el Desarrollo.
Rodríguez-Ariza, C. (2020). Iniciativa de Evaluación Global (GEI): no sin “Impacto Colectivo” [Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI): Not without collective impact]. TripleAD: Aprendiendo a Aprender para el Desarrollo.
Williams, B., Matt, E., Klier, S., Chaplowe, S. G., & Korswagen, S. I. (2024). Toward a systemic approach to evaluating evaluation capacity development. New Directions for Evaluation, 2024(183), 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1002/ev.20612
Note on the use of artificial intelligence: In preparing this article, I used artificial intelligence tools to support the exploration of ideas, broaden perspectives, identify relevant literature, and improve the structure and wording of the text. The reflections, critical perspective, selection of content and conclusions represent my own judgement, for which I take full responsibility.
