Futures, Feedback, and Flexibility: Reimagining Public Sector Management and Evaluation in the Time of Polycrisis

Abstract

This article examines how evaluative practice can better support public management in an era of “polycrisis” marked by climate breakdown, ecological collapse, conflict, inequality, and democratic erosion. Governments need to manage increasing uncertainty and evaluative practice needs to be repositioned and embedded to support emergent policy and management processes. The article draws on a global futures exercise using the 3 Horizons approach with 39 respondents, combined with literature review, AI-assisted analysis, and four case studies of public sector evaluative systems in South Africa, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the City of Cape Town.​ Across the cases, findings show that when evaluation is reconfigured as a diverse set of embedded, collaborative practices, it can inform major spending decisions, reframe policy goals to address the polycrisis, and build institutional capability for continuous learning. The article concludes that transforming evaluation from a narrow, compliance-driven function into an agile, futures-linked, and systems-oriented diverse practice is not optional but a precondition for credible public management in the polycrisis, and calls for deliberate changes in incentives, roles, and governance arrangements to institutionalise this shift.​