“What went wrong with woke?” The problem of measurement and influence.

How twisted narratives and simplistic measures can destroy a major effort to do good. What does this mean for evaluation / MEL?

Private sector Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are crumbling before our eyes in the Western world. But why exactly? In his latest Substack post the ever-inspiring and insightful @JohnFullerton pushes us to go beyond the obvious, to delve to find deeper reasons. He argues that the private sector convinced itself that managing ESG risks and championing DEI made good business sense and was simply "smarter investing". This argument was convincing when oil prices collapsed due to a surge in US production, and big tech flourished as a focus for investment. But after the Ukraine-Russia conflict sent energy stocks soaring, the facade cracked. Meanwhile, questions grew around DEI programmes' financial payoff: Do they risk prioritising social objectives over shareholder returns, and diverting focus from core business operations?

Suddenly, 'woke capitalism' was accused of gutting pension funds and retirement savings.

John points out that the "ESG investing is simply better investing" narrative trivialised the complexity of defining both ESG and "better investing" - and these developments are exposing society's fundamental values: When push comes to shove, money trumps all worthwhile considerations. ESG was sold as a financial strategy, not as values-driven transformation. When market conditions changed, investors abandoned it, revealing its fragile foundation. As a consequence, ESG and DEI became PR tools, prioritising optics over impact.

This situation raises serious concerns for the global evaluation / MEL community (as far as we consider ourselves a global collective that should have some influence): ESG and DEI assessment frameworks were designed to judge individual investments. They assess companies in isolation. They favour short-term, quantifiable results based on rhetoric about "managing change". Consultants got away with simplistic frameworks and meaningless measures; "ticking boxes replaced thoughtful inquiry where there are no simple answers".

Instead, we know it is necessary to encourage "dancing with the system", as Donella Meadows proposed, and to focus on industry-wide shifts. Most importantly, misleading and inadequate measures have to be avoided. Some ESG examples:

Carbon Emissions: Many companies report only direct and energy-related emissions, ignoring supply chain and product use which can account for the majority of their emissions.

Waste Management and Recycling Rate: These measures often lack independent verification, and do not account for the actual lifecycle impact of waste beyond recycling.

Workforce Diversity and Inclusion: Metrics tend to focus on headcounts, e.g. percentage of women in leadership, rather than workplace culture, inclusion and actual employee experiences.

Employee Health and Safety: Some industries have inherently low injury rates, making safety an inadequate ESG proxy across sectors.

Board Diversity and Independence: Having diverse board members does not necessarily mean companies adopt more ethical or sustainable business practices.

Anti-Corruption and Ethical Practices: Many companies claim to have strong policies, but enforcement is inconsistent, and self-reported compliance is unreliable.

The big question: How can the global evaluation / MEL community be much more politically and technically savvy, present and influential in such potentially very impactful efforts and contexts?

Influential organisations and initiatives like the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) played central roles in shaping ESG and also DEI frameworks in the private sector. Such groups worked to standardise metrics, promote investment integration into financial decision-making and legitimise it in the mainstream, enhance accountability, and provide reporting guidelines and frameworks to track corporate ESG and DEI performance.

Yet they struggled to prevent ESG and DEI from being diluted, manipulated or co-opted. They lacked enforcement power, and relied on voluntary compliance and on vague and inconsistent metrics that made comparison difficult. Companies could therefore cherry-pick favourable data while greenwashing or virtue signalling.

These lessons are now available, and many players working in systemic change and transformation spaces are stepping up to the challenge of changing the way investors and investments work for the benefit of humanity and the living and non-living systems of which we are part. See for example the recent Systemic Investing Summit in London - and the power of poetry in support.

The global evaluation community is scaffolded and connected by organisations and networks such as @EvalPartners, @IOCE, the @International Evaluation Academy, @UNEG, @ECG, @OECD DAC and many thematic platforms and national and regional associations of evaluation professionals -mostly focusing on aid and development evaluation / MEL.

How do we determine the limits of the influence and power of evaluative thinking and practice?

As aid - and increasingly likely also aid evaluation - rapidly retreats towards insignificance, will we take up the challenge of acting more strategically as a collective, or even better, as a transformation system in order to gain more influence in powerful spaces, for example supporting systemic investors and others working on efforts to transform global systems to push for drastic change?

Or is it wiser to while away our time with issues with which we are familiar, even though they have limited scope, influence and impact globally? To continue to work at the whim of those who like to fund evaluation / MEL efforts within well-established comfort zones?

Can - and should - the global evaluation / MEL community transform its priorities and ways of working to be of much greater significance in the world today, and in future? If so, what exactly will it take?

A question for those who lead in this space.