Evaluation as an Act of Disruption
By Laurel Burton (she/her), Policy & Evaluation Lead, Endura Consulting
Evaluation is often imagined as a process of measurement, accountability, or retrospective assessment. But at its most transformative, evaluation can be a disruptive force, one that challenges dominant assumptions, shifts power, and changes how systems and people understand success.
Traditional evaluation approaches have historically reinforced existing paradigms: privileging quantitative indicators over lived experience, valuing efficiency over equity, and centring institutional priorities rather than community-defined outcomes.
Disruptive evaluation asks different questions. Who defines evidence? Whose knowledge counts? What outcomes remain invisible because systems were never designed to measure them?
As governments, organizations, and communities confront increasingly complex social, environmental, and economic challenges, evaluation has an opportunity to move beyond compliance and become a catalyst for systems change. Participatory, feminist, Indigenous, and equity-centred evaluation approaches are reshaping the field by challenging extractive practices and redistributing power within knowledge generation. These approaches recognize that evaluation is not neutral; it influences what is funded, sustained, scaled, or abandoned.
Disruptive evaluation also requires rethinking timelines, methods, and notions of expertise. It means embracing complexity rather than oversimplifying it, and valuing relational accountability alongside technical rigour. It also recognizes that some of the most meaningful impacts — trust, self-determination, belonging, healing, and shifts in power — cannot always be neatly quantified. In cultures that prioritize speed and outputs, disruptive evaluation creates space for pause, reflection, and care as essential components of ethical practice.
In this way, evaluation becomes more than a tool for assessing change; it becomes part of the change itself. At a time when many systems are being called to rethink entrenched ways of operating, evaluation has the potential to not only document paradigm shifts, but actively help create them.
