What’s Left to Evaluate
A follow-on to “Who’s Left at the Table”
In a January 2026 piece on the FY26 foreign aid budget, the Center for Global Development authors wrote something that has stayed with me. After laying out the bipartisan compromise that pushed back on the cuts the administration had sought, they turned to a different register, admitting they had been “struggling more than usual when it comes to talking about” evidence and evaluation. They went on briefly and honestly about the bind. It matters more than ever to know whether US assistance is delivering value, and the bandwidth to actually study any of it is shrinking.
That admission is unusual in print from that quarter of the field. It is also worth taking seriously, because the struggle they name is real and it is not only about discourse.
What the struggle actually is
The field is being asked to evaluate a transition that has not yet stabilized into something evaluable. The objects of evaluation are changing under our feet. In a piece last week, Who’s Left at the Table, I wrote about the early data on where new US foreign assistance dollars have actually gone: to a small handful of multilateral pooled funds, and to bilateral government-to-government arrangements. That shift is not only a change in who receives money. It is a change in what kind of work gets done, by whom, and inside what institutional culture.
When the work changes, evaluating it changes too.
What is happening to the craft
The US implementing partner ecosystem developed a particular set of evaluation conventions over several decades, including utilization-focused evaluation, theory-of-change-driven design, third-party mid-term and final evaluations, MEL teams housed inside implementing organizations, and Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting frameworks for ongoing learning. These conventions did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from a delivery architecture that needed them and was, in imperfect but real ways, built to use them.
When the delivery architecture changes, the conventions either travel or they do not. They are not changing because the field decided to change them. They are changing because the institutional homes that supported them are getting smaller, fewer, or differently configured.
The cultures receiving the work
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs runs pooled funds with humanitarian monitoring and evaluation conventions optimized for speed and output reporting. They are designed for crisis response. They are not designed for the kind of longitudinal outcome learning that the US implementing partner ecosystem built over decades.
The Global Fund operates on a vertical-program model with disease-specific indicator frameworks and country reporting systems. Its evaluation culture is real and substantial. It is not the same culture as the broad-spectrum, mixed-methods, utilization-focused tradition.
Bilateral government-to-government arrangements typically have minimal independent third-party evaluation by design. Accountability runs between two states. The affected community is not the audience for the evaluation, if there is one.
None of this is a failure of the new institutional receivers. They have their own histories and conventions, which work for the problems they were built to solve. Those conventions are not, however, interchangeable with the ones the US implementing partner ecosystem developed.
Why the words are getting harder
When CGD writes that they have been struggling to talk about evidence and evaluation, part of what is happening is that those two words now carry different meanings inside the new architectures than they did inside the old one. Value for money looks different through a humanitarian pooled fund than through a USAID cooperative agreement. The same words, with audience-specific meanings, are sliding past each other in the field’s current conversation.
The discourse problem is not that the field forgot how to talk. The referents are moving. The struggle to talk is downstream of that.
A practitioner note
I have built monitoring and evaluation systems inside cooperative agreement structures for years. I have written learning agendas that depended on the continuity of the implementing partner. That continuity is gone in many of the cases I worked in. The systems I built are not as portable into the new architectures as I once assumed they were. The struggle CGD names is not external to me. I am inside it.
Three questions that travel
Three orientations work in any architecture. They are not new. They are the ones the field has been asked to take seriously for a long time and has not always wanted to.
The first is motive: why we are evaluating. Evaluation for control, for justification, and for learning are different practices that produce different power dynamics. The new architectures are arriving with their motives already attached, and naming our own, as evaluators, is now a more visible act than it used to be.
The second is ownership: who owns the knowledge. The implementing partner, the funder, the multilateral pooled fund, the partner government, and the affected community are all candidates. The answer matters because ownership of findings shapes whether findings get used, and by whom.
The third is authorship: who counts as an evidence-maker. Affected communities themselves can be evidence-makers, not only the people the funder hires to study them. Indigenous and participatory traditions have answered this question well for decades. It is harder to ignore in an architecture where the old implementing partner intermediaries are gone.
These orientations are practical, not framework-shaped. They work in cooperative agreements, in pooled funds, in bilateral arrangements, in domestic philanthropy. They survive the architecture shift because they are not architecture-dependent.
CGD’s admission is worth taking seriously. The struggle to talk is real, and it is also structural. Naming what is moving makes the words usable again. The questions that travel are the ones we have been asked to take seriously for a long time. The field’s reorganization may be the moment to actually take them seriously.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio that helps mission-driven organizations clarify and amplify their impact.
