Short Abstract

This presentation explores how evaluation evidence shapes real-world decisions, drawing on the FCDO’s Caribbean Resilience Meta-Evaluation. It reveals how timing, communication, relationships, and institutional capacity influence whether evaluations drive action.

Description

Evaluations are often judged by the quality of their analysis, but their real value lies in how far they shape decisions, behaviours, and systems. This presentation explores these dynamics through the Meta-Evaluation of FCDO Support to Improve Resilience in the Caribbean (2024–2025), undertaken under the Evidence Fund. The study examined how evidence from the 2020–2023 Caribbean Resilience Evaluation (CRE) was used, interpreted, and integrated into the UK’s and partners’ approaches to building resilience in one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions.

The CRE itself assessed a £500 million portfolio of programmes spanning infrastructure, disaster risk management, health-system strengthening, skills, and economic reform.

Using a theory-based, mixed-methods approach, the meta-evaluation drew on documentary review, semi-structured interviews, and outcome-harvesting techniques to trace multiple pathways of influence: instrumental (direct use), conceptual (shaping understanding), process (learning through participation), and symbolic (use to legitimise or communicate alignment). Analysis revealed that evaluation influence is mediated by four primary factors: timing and policy windows, communication and accessibility, institutional relationships and champions, and absorptive capacity and knowledge systems.

Influence was strongest where the CRE coincided with decision-making cycles, notably FCDO’s refresh of its Caribbean Development Strategy 2025–2030, enabling findings to be directly embedded. The evaluation’s legitimacy and participatory design generated ownership among partners, while concise, visual products enhanced usability across institutions. However, influence was constrained by austerity and staff turnover, dense reporting formats, and weak knowledge management systems both within FCDO and across Caribbean governments, which limited organisational learning and continuity.

The study also highlights the temporal dynamics of evidence use. During fiscal contraction, the evaluation was used symbolically and conceptually, to legitimise strategic direction and sustain a shared language of resilience.

The findings underline that evaluation influence is relational and systemic rather than linear. It depends not only on the rigour of evidence, but on the interplay between opportunity, accessibility, trust, and institutional readiness. Evaluations that are timed to align with strategic cycles, co-produced with users, and communicated through layered, user-friendly outputs are far more likely to shape policy and practice.

The presentation will close by reflecting on what this means for evaluators and commissioners across the UK and internationally. It argues for a deliberate “design for use” mindset which treats influence as a process that must be planned, resourced, and sustained beyond publication. For Evidence Fund partners, these insights are informing new approaches to embedding evaluation within organisational learning systems, ensuring that future studies not only generate knowledge but also drive change in policy and practice.