ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the pandemic will impact the practice of evaluation and the understanding of its role in society. It focuses on questions regarding what knowledge is relevant in forming the response to societal crises like the pandemic and what distinguishes the knowledge produced by evaluation from other forms of knowledge. In the chapter, it is argued that forms of knowledge other than evaluation can become more important in crises, which has been clearly illustrated by the pandemic. The chapter identifies two hypotheses which, at least partly, can explain the underutilization of evaluation during the pandemic. The first is that policymakers' original perception of the situation impacted the knowledge which was seen as relevant in designing the response to the pandemic, and the second is that existing knowledge structures have contributed to a limited capacity to search for contradicting and additional knowledge relevant in decisions about the response to the pandemic.
