Blue Marble Evaluation by MICHAEL QUINN PATTON

Author:MICHAEL QUINN PATTON [QUINN PATTON, MICHAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781462543182
Publisher: The Guilford Press

The Guide provides an assessment framework that can be used in any evaluation to map the interactions among SDGs and implement the Blue Marble Cross-Silos principle.

6. Relate Blue Marble evaluation narratives to the Anthropocene metanarrative.

The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem, it will avail us little to solve all others.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, in a 1907 speech

Any given Blue Marble evaluation tells the story of an effort to solve a problem or make a difference of some kind. Each Blue Marble evaluation story unfolds in the context of the bigger picture and longer-term story of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene as Context principle calls on Blue Marble evaluators to understand, adapt to the realities of, and contribute positively to human and ecosystem trajectories in the Anthropocene. The emergence of the Anthropocene is a story of accelerating human impact on Earth, impact that is changing the environment in ways that threaten the future of humanity. So, there are two stories unfolding together: the big-picture long-term story of the Anthropcene and the short-term, real-time story of any given Blue Marble evaluation.

Every evaluation tells a story. There’s a beginning (baseline), something happens (the intervention), and results (the story’s climax). The context and setting for any Blue Marble evaluation is the Anthropocene story, still emerging. Evaluation bricolage at the analysis stage involves interweaving case studies and statistical data in a creative sense-making enterprise. The methods section of such Blue Marble evaluation reports will also tell a story, a tale of eclectically perusing and selecting methods, creating an appropriate bricolage design, adapting the design and methods to emergent understandings and opportunities to capture the stories of systems change interventions as they unfold, then reporting the results, lessons, and surprises they yield.

Stephen James Purdey (2018) is a political scientist and international relations specialist whose work focuses on the evolution of new forms of governance to meet current socioecological challenges. He has begun a metanarrative project “constructing a new global narrative about planetary sustainability.” He writes:

Given the brute fact that Homo sapiens is now a bio-geophysical force fully capable of disrupting long-stable planetary operating systems, it seems illogical for human society to willfully pursue a development agenda which amplifies rather than moderates our extraordinary power. . . .

The new metanarrative we seek isn’t a story set in stone. It’s a conversation, a dynamic and evolving state of mind which confronts, embraces and shapes our shared future. It begins from the historically exceptional fact that we are the sole creators of, and wholly responsible for, the Anthropocene epoch. The new story we tell will feature self-inflicted danger but it will also offer the opportunity to re-imagine the exceptionalism that ennobles the human animal, to rejoin our unique endowments to the planet that gave us life, and to meet our destiny with maturity, flexibility, and courage.

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