The commissioning-to-use gap

First of my five from the State of Evaluation report, and the finding the report itself is most worried about. So much so that the UK Evaluation Society has built its 2026 conference around it: 'Bridging the gap: evaluation to action'.

Evaluation is being commissioned in serious volume, and yet, as far as evaluators can see, it is hardly ever used to inform an actual decision. The report is careful to say this is not a quality problem. It is structural. It sits in organisational cultures, in leadership behaviour, and above all in how late evaluative thinking tends to arrive.

Yes, this resonates. But also, what I see from the arts, culture and place work I evaluate is more hopeful than the headline, and that is what makes the gap so frustrating. At programme level, evaluation is often genuinely welcomed. Formative, summative and developmental work all have a place, and I regularly watch lessons being drawn in the moment, with programmes, strategies and ways of working adapted as they go. The learning loop, on the ground, frequently does close.

Where it tends to break is further up, in the policy and planning process. Time and again the learning fails to make it into the policy itself, even when people at every stage of the policy lifecycle are keen for it to. The will is there. The mechanism is not.

Part of the answer, I think, is to stop treating the evaluation report as the deliverable. The report is the easy bit. The harder and more important questions come before you write a word of it. Who actually needs to hear this, where do they sit in the lifecycle, and what is the form that will let them act on it? Sometimes that is a report. Often it is a conversation, a workshop, a single page in front of the right person at the right moment. If we want evaluation used, we have to design for its use, not just its findings.

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