Kim Forss - Evaluating the Complex: Attribution, Contribution and Beyond

Ray C. Rist, Series Editor

Attribution, Contribution, and Beyond

Comparative Policy Evaluation Volume 18

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1 Introduction
Kim Forss and Robert Schwartz

2 Implications of Complicated and Complex Characteristics for Key Tasks in Evaluation
Patricia J. Rogers

3 Contribution Analysis
John Mayne

4 Micro, Meso, and Macro Dimensions of Change
Mita Marra

5 Coping with the Evaluability Barrier Poverty Impact of European Support at Country Level
Jacques Toulemonde, Douglas Carpenter,and Laurent Raffi er

6 Monitoring and Evaluation of a Multi-Agency Response to Homelessness
Peter Wilkins

7 Evaluating a Complex Policy in a Complex Context
Markus Spinatsch

8 Intervention Path Contribution Analysis (IPCA) for Complex Strategy Evaluation
Robert Schwartz and John Garcia

9 Responding to a Global Emergency and Evaluating That ResponseThe Case of HIV/AIDS
Kim Forss

10 Evaluating Complex Strategic Development Interventions: The Challenge of Child Labor
Burt Perrin and Peter Wichmand

11 Challenges in Impact Evaluation of Development Interventions
Jos Vaessen

12 Some Insights from Complexity Science for the Evaluation of Complex Policies
Mita Marra

It is a pleasure to have been invited to write a foreword to this exciting and timely volume in which the editors have brought together so many of the major thinkers and practitioners in contemporary evaluation who are interested in complexity. The risk in a foreword is to repeat the syntheses and analyses of othersbut Kim Forss and Robert Schwartz provide an excellent overview in their introduction to this volume; and Mita Marra has situated the text in the wider context of current ideas in complexity science. Instead of duplicating their efforts, I will confine myself to a few personal reflections on why the thinking exemplified in this book has become timely and what this may portend for evaluative practice.

I find myself considering this volume firstly from an historical perspective. How is it that ideas that variously sail under the flag of complexityor holism, non-linearity, systems theory and cyberneticshave come to the fore? Implicit in this question is the acknowledgment that in the wider world of ideas, complexity as a focus is not that new. The thought-lines of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, James Miller, Fred Emery, Eric Trist, Stafford Beer, Russ Ackoff, and Peter Checkland, to name but a few, stretches back at least to the 1950sindeed von Bertalanfy had formulated his key ideas in biology by 1928. In the early 1950s the Society for General Systems Research was launched by the biologist von Bertalanffy, the economist Kenneth Boulding, and the mathematician Anatol Rappaport. This was also the era when cybernetics in its various forms first provided a rich resource of metaphors and analogies built on by people like Norbert Weiner, John von Neumann, and Ross Ashby among others. Social scientists in the late 1960s and early 1970s were offered a number of stimulating revisionist frameworks for their work: prominent examples would be two edited collectionsWalter Buckleys Modern Systems Research for the Behavioural Scientist and Fred Emerys first edition of Systems Thinking. At the risk of gross-oversimplification, these ideas all challenged the reductionist, deterministic, and linear logic of traditional science and focused attention on dynamic systems, whose interdependent parts adapted and evolved in complex ways through feedback and openness to their environment.