ABSTRACT
Taking a long-term perspective on change can offer a number of benefits for program managers and evaluators. Although there has been a growing number of funders adopting long-term evaluations in recent years, due to donor funding cycles and other organizational factors, the commissioning of long-term evaluations is likely to continue to be the exception rather than the rule for many funders. However, commitment to a long-term perspective in evaluation does not imply that commissioning a long-term evaluation is the only way to “take the long view” in practice. This chapter contends that taking a systems lens can help a short-term evaluation integrate a more long-term perspective. Through the examples of two short-term evaluations conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Nepal, we demonstrate that building long-term systems perspectives into short-term evaluation can contribute to evaluations which better assess the likelihood of program sustainability, more robustly estimate contributions to long-term change processes, and more reliably identify unintended consequences and alternative explanations.
