Blue Marble Evaluation

Evaluation is a discipline that spans many fields, and it can contribute to international efforts to build a lasting, sustainable future that crosses borders and spans sectors and topics. Blue Marble Evaluation is a framework for designing, adjusting, and assessing large-scale systems change projects that depend on tangled webs of stakeholders.

Michael Quinn Patton explains the framework's four overarching principles and twelve operating principles, showing how evaluators, planners, and those carrying out programs can focus on sustainability and fairness within an intervention. The book uses detailed case examples, bulleted checklists, charts, and roughly 90 original exhibits and graphics to link the global with the local and the human with the ecological.

The approach draws on utilization-focused, developmental, and principles-focused evaluation, and it is meant for problems that fall outside the scope of conventional evaluation practice.