Note: Session participants taking part in the analysis exercise at the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA) Conference, Johannesburg, 7–9 October 2024.
The world is facing unprecedented challenges with interlinked systems degrading including climate, ecosystems, disruptions from technology, and extreme inequality. This is sometimes referred to as a polycrisis. The mission of the Academy is for evaluation to contribute to
reversing this and creating a regenerating world.
In order to develop a way forward to contribute to addressing the polycrisis, the Academy started a 3 Horizons Evaluation Initiative (3HEi) in May 2024. The 3 Horizons approach is relevant when stakeholders have some agency to make change happen, but the future is very uncertain. Horizon 1 maps the current situation, Horizon 3 the future we aspire to, and Horizon 2 how we get there.
Some initiatives which are apparently transformational get captured by the status quo and are referred to as H2- initiatives (think carbon offsets, or ESG) and some are genuinely transformational – the H2+ initiatives.
The work was led by Zenda Ofir, an evaluation and transformations expert and Academy Friend, and Ian Kendrick, a 3 Horizons and strategy expert (and since an Academy Friend), and Ian Goldman, President of the Academy, but with a core group of 8 people driving the process. The work was supported by SAMEA, which provided a young emerging evaluator, Sibongile Sithole, for 3 months to support the work, subsequently supported by the Academy. Sibongile has won an award from EvalforEarth for this work.
An initial survey with 13 questions around the 3 horizons was sent to 100 key thinkers and activists involved with evaluation in some form. 39 responded, with deep reflections which provided a very rich picture. With the support of Silva Ferretti (an evaluation and AI expert and Academy Friend) this was analysed using AI, with complex responses split so that they could be grouped, and then checked by humans, including at a co-creation event at the 2024 SAMEA Conference. Eighteen people from all continents were then involved in successive clustering to create systems maps of the current situation (H1), the future the field aspired to in 2035 (H3), and the transition pathway (H2). The maps were then tested at events with the informants, with Academy Friends, at the IDEAS 2025 Conference, and then revised substantially, including with specific inputs to strengthen Indigenous and gender aspects. They were then launched in July 2025 in two webinars with partners in a 3HEi-Global Evaluation Agenda coalition being established and at a ReLAC event for Latin America and the Caribbean in September 2025.
The methodology has been written up in a chapter which will be available in mid-2026. The transformation approach was tested at the Transformations Community Conference in Johannesburg in August 2025. A blog summarizes the key messages of what emerged, and an article will be available in April 2026 with details of the emerging picture.