Keynotes
der 28. DeGEval-Jahrestagung vom 17.-19.09.2025 an der Universität des Saarlandes
The Institutionalization of Evaluation in a Global Perspective
The use of evaluation is increasing in a global scale. More and more countries are using evaluation as a tool for producing reliable and trustworthy data to inform evidence-based decisions for program management, impact assessment and policy making. To this end, the institutionalization and professionalization of evaluation has been pushed forward on a massive level in many countries. However, until now there has been a lack of a global overview of these developments as well as of the factors driving and hindering them. For this reason, the CEval Evaluation GLOBE Project was launched in 2016 to analyze as many countries as possible on all continents in order to close this research gap. To date, 50 country case studies and 11 reports from transnational organizations have been published in four volumes (Europe 2020; Americas 2022; Asia-Pacific 2023 and Africa 2025), in which 137 authors have contributed. This has resulted in a globally unique database that serves as the empirical basis for the international stream of this year's DeGEval annual conference.
In the keynote speech, the complete results of the CEval Evaluation GLOBE Project will be presented for the first time. During the following sessions, the findings will be taken up, successively expanded and discussed under various aspects by the authors of the country case studies from a continental perspective.
The keynote speech will begin with the research objectives and the theoretical and methodological approach underlying the project presented.
This is followed by a presentation of the findings on the institutionalization and use of evaluation in the political and social system and the degree of professionalization of evaluation in the countries studied. A double comparative analysis perspective is applied for this purpose. Firstly, the results of these three different systems that are presented are compared by country, followed by an intercontinental comparison.
Finally, the promoting and hindering factors for the institutionalization and use of evaluation as well as the challenges for the future of evaluation will be identified.
Reinhard Stockmann is Senior Professor of Sociology, founder and director of the Centre for Evaluation (CEval) at Saarland University and head of the English-language Master of Evaluation (MABLE) program, co-founder and (from 2002 to 2022) editor-in-chief of the Journal for Evaluation, founding member of the German Evaluation Society (DeGEval) and the Development Policy Working Group. From 2004 to 2021, he co-directed the first German-language Master's program in Evaluation. He has published and edited about 300 articles and more than 50 books, some of which have been translated into several languages. He has conducted hundreds of evaluations in numerous countries and has worked for over 40 years on evaluation theory and methods, particularly in the fields of development cooperation/policy, education, vocational training, the environment, and foreign cultural policy. He has taught at many universities abroad, including Thailand, China, Russia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Switzerland. As part of the CEval Evaluation GLOBE project, which he directs, he is working on the global institutionalization of evaluation. To date, case study volumes on Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific have been published between 2020 and 2023, with a final volume on Africa planned for 2025.
Professionalization for what? Evaluation between aspiration and reality
Global crises, the erosion of evidence-based policy, and rapid technological change—particularly through artificial intelligence—are fundamentally changing the framework for evaluation. Evaluators face growing demands: their skills must become more diverse, their roles more flexible, and their actions more strategic. What does this mean for the profession itself?
The keynote address will examine key aspects of what professionalization is actually aimed at in light of radical societal changes, and the (new) conditions and limitations of professional evaluation. It will also focus on key structural challenges—in particular, the decline in continuing education opportunities in the field of evaluation, as well as the reduction of evaluation positions in institutions in some European countries that were once considered pioneers in the institutionalization of evaluation. Thus, while the demands on evaluators are steadily increasing, institutional training opportunities and the number of professionally established positions are simultaneously shrinking—a tension that threatens sustainable professionalization.
Based on empirical findings and practical examples, we will discuss how professionalism is shaped in this field of tension – and what implications this has or could have for the further development of the field. The invitation is to rethink one's own role as evaluators and to actively shape the profession – as a learning, adaptive, and effective community.
Stefanie Krapp heads the Evaluation Department at the Lifelong Learning Center (LLC) at the University of Bern. Here, she is responsible for the evaluation study program and, until the end of 2024, the World Bank's renowned International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET). She has 25 years of experience in the field of evaluation, particularly in the context of development cooperation: at the Center for Evaluation (CEval) at Saarland University, as an integrated long-term expert in Laos and Costa Rica, as Senior Evaluation Officer at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), and as a Head of Department at the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval). Her work focuses on the development and implementation of M&E systems, Theory-based evaluations, Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD), and, within this context, the design and implementation of training programs in evaluation. She studied sociology and political science at the University of Mannheim and Indiana University (USA) and received her PhD at Saarland University.
