Economists and development practitioners acknowledge that the world is entering the age of the 4th Industrial Revolution [4IR]. Beginning the 1760’s the first revolution was on the transition from hand production to steam and water, and the transformation from agriculture to industry; the second, starting around 1870 was driven by railroads, electricity, mechanization and rising productivity; the third which began in the late 20th century, and which is still ongoing was based on the digital revolution, computers and Technology logical innovation. The fourth industrial revolution, which is already underway is based on networked information systems, automation of manufacturing, large scale machine-to-machine communication, smart machines, artificial intelligence and automated decision-making.
Despite the radical social, economic, political and technological transformations that 4IR is already introducing, there has been relatively little discussion in the evaluation community of how these dramatic changes will affect the nature of evaluation practice, the new questions that evaluations must address, the revolutionary new evaluation tools and techniques, including artificial intelligence, and the potentially greater role that evaluation can have over the next decades.
While evaluation practice currently has a relatively secure and defined role in the development field (almost all development programs are subject to one or more evaluations), in future conventional evaluation offices and consulting services will be competing with fundamental different ways of collecting and using information to monitor and assess the performance of economic, political and social initiatives. For example, many organizations are beginning to use integrated data bases, machine learning and artificial intelligence, combined with modeling and simulation technology (such as digital twins) to assess performance.
In 2020 my colleague Pete York and myself were invited by the Evaluation Matters journal of the African Development Bank to produce a two-part publication considering the implications of 4IR for evaluation practice in Africa. These two publications are available through the following links.
Part 1 discusses the current nature of development evaluation practice, and why a new evaluation paradigm will be required to address the challenges and opportunities of the 4th industrial revolution in Africa.https://idev.afdb.org/sites/default/files/Evaluations/2020-07/Acticle%208-The%20culture%20of%20evaluation%20in%20the%20age%20of%20big%20data%20The%20need%20for%20a%20new%20evaluation%20paradigm%20for%20the%204th%20Industrial%20Revolution.pdf
Part 2 examines the transformation of evaluation in response to the 4th Industrial Revolution. It examines why the transition will be disruptive for evaluation practice, while identifying both the challenges and the opportunities. The example of an impact evaluation of a road construction project in Ghana is used to illustrate how the new evaluation methods are already starting to be applied.
evaluationperspectives.org 