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Concluding Remarks

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Abstract

Projects deployed to respond to complex and wicked problems (e.g., sustainability and international development) are not well equipped to respond adaptively and innovatively to the significant challenges they face. While the developmental evaluation approach offers a welcome addition to the field of evaluation in that it supports project practitioners to optimise the use of their experiential learning, this approach has yet to articulate an epistemological framework that accounts for complexity or for learning under complex conditions. Drawing on empirical research and concepts from enactive cognitive science, Mitchell advances a framework for interacting orthogonally with practitioners to induce ruptures in the habituated patterns of observation to trigger fresh action options, and to participate actively in the generation of their own learning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For further details, see Table 4.1, Chapter 4.

  2. 2.

    This respects Maturana’s (1988) distinction between the two explanatory paths of ‘objectivity-within-parentheses ’ and ‘objectivity-without-parentheses ’, respectively.

  3. 3.

    The panarchy and adaptive cycle models (Gunderson and Holling 2002) are both useful points of reference here.

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  1. ADAPT Management, Leicester, UK

    Andrew Mitchell

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Mitchell, A. (2019). Concluding Remarks. In: Second-order Learning in Developmental Evaluation. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99371-3_5

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