Evaluating the future - challenges and approaches to the evaluation of long-term missions

Mission or challenge oriented policies/interventions have become prominent in the past decade in innovation and other policy domains. This reflects a recognition of the need for a long-term focus to address societal challenges including for example, the Net Zero transition. The new UK Government has committed to ‘national missions’, including on economic growth and clean energy, central to which is the Industrial Strategy.  The Government is thinking through how to monitor and evaluate performance of the Industrial Strategy in this context.

Missions and challenges pose issues for evaluation. They are complex and long-term, with anticipated outcomes often realised well into the future, and beyond the lifetime of projects/programmes implemented to support their delivery. However, policy-makers need evidence in the near-term to justify on-going investment, and learning to inform on-going delivery. 

In this podcast SQW Managing Partner and podcast host Joe Duggett is joined by SQW Associate Director Rebecca Pates to explore this challenge, drawing on SQW’s recent presentation at the UK Evaluation Society Conference in Glasgow. The podcast:

  • reflects on the lessons from SQW’s evaluation of the Transforming Food Production Challenge; a mission-led programme to set the food production sector on a trajectory to net zero emissions by 2040
  • discusses the importance of triangulation, mixed methods and diverse data sources in evaluating missions and challenges
  • discusses new and innovative methods to provide insight on potential future effects, and some wider trends in wider trends and developments in evaluation practice.

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