Blue chips are well known programs like the World Food Program or UNICEF; they are world-famous, stable, and have a good reputation. A program that seeks to scale, to enter other territories within or outside the country is the equivalent of high-growing stock in the financial market.

Undervalued stock is a program that is in transition and needs help to get through and adapt to change. Long-term bonds are the equivalent of operating support for a program without specifying what specific project the program will implement.

This exercise helps social investors understand that they value different financial instruments differently. They look at different types of stocks, investment funds or bonds using different criteria, and we also evaluate different programs using different criteria depending on the nature of the program and the nature of the investment. Using the logic of evaluating financial instruments helps them understand the logic of evaluating programs.

Investors in social projects also have internal networks and have developed a number of methodological approaches. For example, they are very fond of the social return on investment (SROI) method. Sometimes it is even taken as the only possible, no-alternative method for evaluating the results of any project. This seems to go at odds with the evaluation specialists’ views – again, based on the utilization-focused evaluation concept.

The social effectiveness of investments still needs to be interpreted and adapted, depending on whether we are talking about long-term or short-term social effectiveness of investments, about innovative high-risk programs, high-risk programs with high performance potential, or low-risk, low-return programs. When I talk about parallels between different kinds of financial instruments and different kinds of programs, I’m talking about how much risk social project investors are willing to take, how innovative they want to be, what the time span is for investment and return, whether they are looking for several different indicators or just one measure of success.

There is a lot to negotiate and a lot to adapt, even with the general criteria of investing in social projects. It is also necessary to determine what it means to invest in social projects and the effectiveness of such investments in a particular situation. And this is where utilization-focused evaluation is needed, because it provides a dialogue with clients and helps them articulate the timing, the criteria, the degree of risk they are willing to accept, and the required level of return on investment.

The next question concerns the theory of transformation. What is the difference between your proposed term “theory of transformation” and theory of change?

That’s a great question! Theory of change was a concept suggested in 1995 by sociologist Carol Weiss, who observed how foundations began to implement programs without knowing what data on effectiveness the studies showed. They didn’t know about advances in social sciences, about how to fight poverty or drug addiction.

Now we have moved on to trying to change entire systems (climate, agriculture, food, healthcare). When you start changing the system, you go beyond one particular project.

The theory of change looks at an individual project or program, while the theory of transformation, trying to change systems, must consist of many different theories of change. For example, the anti-smoking campaign has more than one theory of change. You need to educate people about the dangers of smoking, work with advertising and marketing, with healthcare. You need regulations and incentives, active work with tobacco manufacturers, with young people, with the elderly.

There are many different approaches to fighting smoking, each with their own theory of change, and the theory of transformation attempts to integrate all of these different theories of change to achieve an overall systemic impact.

I think this also applies to the Blue Marble concept [8] that you’re working on right now. Could you briefly describe the main ideas of this concept?1

The Blue Marble evaluation is related to the theory of transformation: once we start dealing with large systems, we are dealing with global impacts. For example, the state of agriculture in any country is affected by climate change, world markets, government policies, the policies of international agencies, trade, and transportation. The idea behind the Blue Marble evaluation is that we need to understand not only what is happening in a particular local program, but also how that program is affected by global and international trends, such as pandemics or climate change.

The Blue Marble evaluation concept connects the local with the global. The English word for this is “glocal,” which is a portmanteau of “local” and “global.” It means looking for interactions and interconnections between the local and the global, so that our understanding at the global level is based on an understanding of local processes, and our understanding of what is happening at the local level is conditioned by an understanding of global trends.

Let’s talk about the implementation of this concept in the evaluators’ practical work. For example, if an evaluator decides to use the Blue Marble concept in his work, where should they begin?