Short Abstract

Meet-the-Author session on Ukraine’s emerging national evaluation system, showing how evaluation architectures, capacities and incentives shape real policy and programme decisions in fragile, crisis-affected contexts, and what this means for influencing change elsewhere.

Description

This Meet the Author session will explore how a national evaluation system can support – and sometimes struggle to support – evidence-informed policy and programme change in a highly fragile, rapidly evolving context. Drawing on the discussion paper Strengthening Evidence-Based Decision Making in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States: Insights from Ukraine’s National Evaluation System (DEval Discussion Paper 3/2025), the session uses Ukraine as a case study to examine how evaluation infrastructure, incentives and capacities shape real-world decisions on recovery, reconstruction and EU accession.

The paper finds that monitoring and evaluation of public policy in Ukraine is widely referenced in regulations and strategies, yet actual evaluation practice remains patchy and weakly institutionalised. Fragmented responsibilities, limited political demand for evaluation, and the absence of a coherent legal framework constrain the systematic use of evidence. At the same time, war-related recovery and reconstruction, and the EU accession process, have created powerful external pressures and opportunities to build stronger evaluation systems. Civil society organisations, evaluation associations and international partners are emerging as important actors, piloting practices and norms that can influence how public institutions generate and use evaluative knowledge.

In the session, the author will briefly present the paper’s conceptual framing and qualitative case study methodology, and then focus on the entry points it identifies for strengthening policy and programme change through evaluation. These include: clarifying mandates and co-ordination structures for government-led evaluation; using EU accession and reconstruction funding as levers for institutionalising evaluation; investing in evaluation capacity development across state and non-state actors; and fostering a culture that values learning alongside accountability. The session will highlight the tensions between urgent decision-making in crisis and the longer-term, systemic work of building a national evaluation system.

A facilitated discussion will invite participants to interrogate the transferability of these insights beyond Ukraine: How can evaluators and policymakers in other fragile or politically contested settings use windows of opportunity (e.g. reform processes, external funding, crises) to embed evaluation more deeply? What kinds of adaptive approaches and partnerships help ensure that evaluation findings travel into policy and programme decisions, rather than remaining at the margins?

The session will be of interest to evaluators, commissioners, policymakers and funders concerned with Theme 1 of the conference. Participants will leave with a richer understanding of how national evaluation architectures interact with politics, conflict and reform – and with practical ideas for leveraging evaluation to influence policy and programme change in their own contexts.