In this blog, Yulye Jessica Romo Ramos shares her view on the crises of relevance and credibility in evaluation and the role storytelling can play.
Evaluation is facing a crisis: questions of representation, relevance, harmful practice and credibility are more pressing than ever.
There has been a proliferation of ethics committees and guidelines to tackle bad practice and reduce harm in evaluation. And in recent years, there have been calls to decolonise evaluation, to recognise our non-equitable, non-diverse, and non-inclusive evaluation systems, and the hegemony of dominant evaluation paradigms and methods these systems lead to.
Most recently, there have been heated debates around the “violence of evaluation” – a keynote at the 2025 UK Evaluation Society’s conference – which called for a look “at the systemic potential for harm within our dominant evaluation paradigms…[whereby] a poorly conceived evaluation, even with good intentions, can “violate” a community’s sense of self, its knowledge systems, or its capacity for organic change”.
This debate was continued online, pointing to extractive practices, reductionist approaches and the violence inflicted on evaluators themselves. Therefore, it is not surprising that evaluation is perceived by many as a conduit that sustains the status quo and a colonial tool that perpetuates the dominance of Euro-Western methods and notions of rigour over lived experience and local knowledge.
All of these movements and calls tell us that evaluation continues to harm and fails to provide representative and credible evidence. Moreover, global trends like fake news and post-truth politics have added to the relevance and credibility crises in evaluation, thereby threatening the legitimacy of evaluation as such.
Could storytelling be part of the solution? I think so! When used in ways that are truly relational, culturally-anchored and trauma-informed, stories can shift power, change mindsets, honour diverse voices and lived experiences, and produce evidence that is more relevant, credible, inclusive and impactful.
Not surprisingly, there has been an increased uptake in storytelling approaches in evaluation, such as most significant change and outcomes harvesting, to be more culturally responsive, inclusive, and to bring epistemic pluralism to evaluation. But despite best intentions, current practice is non-relational, non-aligned with social and/or cultural realities, not trauma-informed and continues to unintentionally sustain the status quo and promote colonial narratives (to name some issues). A lot of these issues start with our systems, from the notion of what a valuable story is, and negatively impact how we engage with people; how we collect, manage and edit stories; and how we repackage and report them.
Could storytelling be part of the solution? And if so, how do we move beyond tokenistic methods to truly relational, culturally anchored, and trauma-informed practices?
Join November’s EvalNatter to discuss, share your experiences, and connect with others in the evaluation community.
Yulye Jessica Romo Ramos, will guide this month’s EvalNatter discussion, where we’ll explore how storytelling in evaluation can shift power, honour diverse voices, and produce evidence that is credible, inclusive, and impactful. This event is based on a half-day training provided by Yulye Jessica Romo Ramos, Director of Nexus Evaluation Ltd.
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