Michael Quinn Patton - Blue Marble Evaluation: Premises and Principles

Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use

Michael Quinn Patton

Developmental Evaluation Exemplars: Principles in Practice

Edited by Michael Quinn Patton, Kate McKegg, and Nan Wehipeihana

Principles-Focused Evaluation: The GUIDE

Michael Quinn Patton

Epub Edition ISBN: 9781462543182; Kindle Edition ISBN: 9781462543175

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To our grandchildren

on Jeans side,

Erik, Alek, Dylan, Eli, Henry, and Oliver,

and my foursome,

Calla, Sylvia, Jasper, and little Coconut

And to all the grandchildren,

with a mix of deep worry and great hope

for the future of Earth and humanity

On December 7, 1972, the first photograph of the whole Earth from space was taken by the astronauts in Apollo 17. That photo became known as the Blue Marble shot. Blue Marble evaluation takes its name from that whole-Earth image. The Blue Marble perspective means looking beyond nation-state boundaries and across sector and issue silos to connect the global and the local, connect the human and ecological, and connect evaluative thinking and methods with those trying to bring about global systems transformation. Blue Marble evaluation focuses on transforming evaluation to evaluate the transformations necessary to reverse negative climate change effects and make human life on Earth more sustainable and equitable.

Before there was the Blue Marble shot, there was the Earthrise photo from Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to the moon. The space capsule entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. The astronautsCommander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Andersheld a live broadcast from lunar orbit in which they showed pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. One of those photos, showing a partial Earth and some of the moons surface, was dubbed Earthrise. Nature photographer Galen Rowell declared it the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.

It was the first image of our planet captured by a human from beyond Earths orbit. We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.

Earthrise evokes perspective. The Blue Marble principles presented in this book highlight the importance of how we see things and think about them, inviting us to think, engage, design, and evaluate with global consciousness.

At the time, I was in Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta), one of the poorest countries in the world, both then and now. I was doing agricultural extension work with subsistence farmers as a Peace Corps volunteer and my wife, Karen Wilson, was doing nutrition and prenatal education through the maternity clinic of Fada NGourma, the town where we lived for 2 years. We listened to the space broadcast on our short-wave radio, but did not see the photos until later.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 became the first human to walk on the moon. My African (Gourma) counterpart, M. Lompo Bernard, was fascinated by the idea of humans going to the moon so I asked friends to send me information for him in French. His mother lived 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from the town of Fada NGourma. On the eve of the moonwalk, I accompanied him to see her. She had never been out of the region in which she was born. Her whole life had been spent in that place and it was all she knew.

As we sat on short, hand-carved stools, drinking millet beer, he pointed to the moon and told his mother, Tomorrow the Americans are going to the moon.

She turned to me nonchalantly and said in the Gourma language, Have a good trip?

I was struck by her openness to the idea of my going to the moon and her complete lack of understanding of what space travel involved. The next day, July 16, 1969, during the actual moon landing, I was on a remote dirt path with my broken-down motor scooter. I had to walk 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) to find help. The technological juxtaposition made an impression.

A week following the moonwalk, I was in the capital city, Ouagadougou, and saw a news magazine with a photo of Earth taken from Apollo 11, a precursor of the 1972 photo from Apollo 17 that was dubbed the Blue Marble shot. Seeing the Earth from that vantage point made a deep impression and stuck with me. I was 24 years old and impressed with how country borders vanished when the Earth was seen from space. This was the time of the Vietnam War and the country of Upper Volta was a French colonial creation only recently independent. The French arbitrarily divided the people of the Gourma tribe between Niger and Upper Volta, severely hampering interactions among villages and people going back centuries.

I traveled throughout West Africa during the late 1960s, deeply cognizant that the countries created by colonial powers were artificial, disruptive, unstable, and often in conflict. The Biafran War (19671970) was going on then, a war between the government of Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra, home of the Igbo people. The Nigerian government imposed a blockade that led to severe famine. During the 2 years of the war, military casualties were estimated at more than 100,000, while between 500,000 and 2 million Biafran civilians were estimated to have starved to death. Refugees fleeing the conflict reached Upper Volta with tales of horrible suffering.

Fast forward 45 years later through a career as a professional evaluator, trainer, author, and storyteller. What a long, strange trip its been, not to the moon, but around the world. The trip continues and now the world itself is in danger. In 2015, when the United Nations declared the International Year of Evaluation, tremendous resources were poured into strengthening national evaluation capacities. I was involved in training evaluators around the world. I came to see a growing disparity between the emphasis on building evaluation capacity at the nation-state level and the evidence that global problems cannot effectively be addressed solely at the nation-state level. We also need evaluators who can think, act, and evaluate globally. I developed a training program to prepare evaluators to evaluate global systems change. The need, it seemed to me, was for evaluators trained, engaged, and supported to be