New Framework Shows How Evaluation Can Drive Real Food System Transformation

When societies try to remake the systems that feed them, one deceptively simple question keeps surfacing: how do we know whether any of it is actually working? A team of researchers and practitioners led by Sam J. Buckton of the University of York and colleagues, publishing in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, has now offered one of the most detailed answers yet. Working with Food for the Future, a large regional food system change initiative in North Yorkshire, England, the group designed, implemented and began embedding an entirely new kind of evaluation—one built not to judge a project’s success against fixed targets, but to help an entire ecosystem of actors learn whether genuine transformation is underway. The study provides a rare, candid account of what such an effort looks like in practice, from the first design conversations to the friction of putting the framework to work on the ground.

Evaluation, in the formal sense, is the process of assigning quality, value or importance to something. In mainstream practice, that usually means measuring whether a program delivered its planned outputs: number of farms engaged, tonnes of food redistributed, pounds of funding spent. Transformation-focused evaluation represents a fundamental departure from that tradition. It asks instead whether the deep structures of a system—its rules, relationships, power dynamics, incentives and underlying narratives—are shifting, and whether an initiative’s activities are contributing to that shift, either in potential or in actuality. It also asks something mainstream evaluation rarely contemplates: what are the impacts of transformations already in motion, and how can organizations maintain the agility to adapt as conditions change? The authors describe this as a relatively recent chapter in the evolution of the evaluation field, one that remains technically and institutionally challenging and is notably short of documented case studies.

The North Yorkshire initiative offered an ideal testing ground. Food for the Future is a regional-scale effort to change how food is produced, distributed, consumed and valued across a large, predominantly rural county, involving farmers, businesses, community groups, public institutions and researchers. The scale matters, the researchers argue, because food system transformation cannot be stewarded by any single organization. It requires a distributed network of actors, each acting on partial knowledge, all needing to understand whether their combined efforts add up to systemic change. That requirement turns evaluation from a retrospective reporting exercise into a living infrastructure for learning—one that must be designed collaboratively and embedded into the everyday routines of everyone involved.

At the heart of the framework is a set of core evaluation questions that anchor everything else. Rather than asking narrowly whether a specific intervention worked, the questions probe the state of transformation itself: is the food system changing in the directions the initiative considers desirable, what contributions are various actors making, what unintended consequences are emerging, and where is adaptive capacity being built or lost? These questions are deliberately broad, because transformation is inherently uncertain and emergent. The team paired them with explicit evaluation goals and a set of guiding principles—referred to in the framework as guides—that shape how evidence should be gathered, who should be involved in interpreting it, and how judgments about value and progress should be made without defaulting to conventional, narrow metrics.

The technical architecture of the system rests on integrating different forms of feedback, sense-making and learning so that they reinforce one another. Feedback in this design is not a single annual report but a continuous flow of information from multiple sources: structured monitoring of activities, qualitative accounts from participants, reflective conversations among partners, and broader signals about the regional food environment. Sense-making is the deliberate, collective process of interpreting that feedback—bringing diverse actors together to discuss what the evidence means, where it conflicts, and what it implies for future action. Learning then closes the loop, feeding conclusions back into strategy, funding decisions and day-to-day practice. The framework shows how these three elements can be woven together into what the authors call an ecosystem of actors, each contributing to and drawing from a shared pool of understanding about the transformation.

One of the study’s most valuable contributions is its honesty about the difficulties. The authors document innovations and progress, but they also catalogue the challenges of applying the framework in a real setting. Transformation-focused evaluation demands time, trust and relational infrastructure that conventional funding streams rarely provide. Participants must be willing to surface uncomfortable truths about power and progress, and organizations must accept that evaluation findings may challenge their own assumptions and plans. Embedding the system so that it survives beyond initial enthusiasm and individual champions emerged as a central difficulty—one that the team addresses by designing the framework to be owned collectively rather than held by any single partner.

The collaborative design process itself carries lessons. The framework was not imposed by external evaluators but co-produced with the initiative’s partners, including practitioners from local government, food businesses and community organizations alongside academic researchers. The author list itself reflects this, spanning twenty-seven contributors from universities and practice. This co-production, the researchers suggest, is not merely a matter of legitimacy; it is methodologically necessary. Because transformation is experienced and enacted by people across the system, the evidence needed to evaluate it must come from those people, and the sense-making must include their perspectives if it is to produce knowledge that is both credible and actionable.

For the growing number of organizations and initiatives worldwide now interested in transformation-focused evaluation—from climate transition networks to circular economy programs—the study offers a transferable template. The framework’s structure of core questions, goals, guides and integrated feedback loops can, in principle, be adapted to any societal system where deep change is the ambition. The authors emphasize that the point is not to replicate the North Yorkshire system exactly but to learn from its design logic: how evaluation can maintain organizational agility, support adaptation under uncertainty, and help initiatives understand both their potential and actual contributions to transformation rather than simply counting deliverables.

The timing of the work is significant. Global crises—climate change, biodiversity loss, diet-related disease, food insecurity—are widely recognized to require transformation of societal systems, with food systems frequently cited as a critical leverage point. Yet the field of evaluation has been slower to evolve, and initiatives attempting systemic change have often been forced to measure themselves with tools designed for simpler, more linear interventions. By documenting the full arc from design to early implementation, the study fills a conspicuous gap, giving practitioners a concrete reference point rather than abstract principles alone.

Ultimately, the research reframes what evaluation is for. In the authors’ vision, evaluation is not a verdict delivered at the end of a project but a continuous stewardship practice—a way for communities, institutions and researchers to collectively perceive whether the systems they depend on are genuinely changing, and to adjust course while there is still time to do so. The Food for the Future framework demonstrates that such a practice can be designed, implemented and embedded at regional scale, and it maps both the promise and the friction of doing so. As more initiatives take up the challenge of transformation-focused evaluation, the lessons from North Yorkshire—about collaboration, honesty, adaptability and the hard institutional work of embedding learning—will likely shape how the next generation of system change efforts understands its own progress.

Subject of Research: Transformation-focused evaluation framework for a regional food system change initiative

Article Title: Designing, implementing and embedding transformation-focused evaluation: A framework and insights from a regional food system change initiative

Article References: Buckton, S. J., Everson, R., Fazey, I., Ball, P., Bridle, S., Crossland, A., Thompson, J., Haslam, P., Hind, T., Mair, S., Reed, A. L., Whittaker, E., Beacroft, L., Beason, R., Cassarly, J., Cordero, J. P., Cousquer, S., Graver, A., Newman, R., … Tyfield, D. (2026). Designing, implementing and embedding transformation-focused evaluation: A framework and insights from a regional food system change initiative. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(4), e0000236. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000236

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000236

Keywords: transformation-focused evaluation, food systems, system transformation, North Yorkshire, Food for the Future, evaluation framework, learning systems, sustainability, co-production, adaptive capacity, regional food policy, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation