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

The finding overturns a long-standing assumption about where the stones came from. Plumpton Rocks, a source considerably closer to the monument, had previously been identified as the most probable origin of the Arrows. By reading the microscopic mineral fingerprints locked inside the stones, the research team demonstrated that this earlier identification was wrong. The builders of the Devil’s Arrows, rather than taking the nearest convenient boulders, chose to quarry and transport their material from a far more distant and challenging location, a decision that speaks volumes about the values and beliefs of the people who undertook one of the most ambitious engineering projects of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain.

The technical breakthrough at the heart of the study lies in a remarkably gentle sampling technique. Standing stones of this significance cannot simply be drilled or chipped without causing damage to monuments that have survived for four thousand years, so the team developed a low-impact method that uses adhesive tape to lift tiny mineral grains directly from the rock surface. The grains collected in this way are individual crystals of minerals such as zircon, which act as geological time capsules. When these crystals form deep within the Earth’s crust, they incorporate trace amounts of uranium, which decays to lead at precisely known rates, allowing scientists to calculate the age at which each grain crystallised.

Because the rocks at any given outcrop carry a distinctive population of crystal ages, effectively a geological fingerprint, the researchers could compare the age spectra recovered from the Devil’s Arrows with samples from candidate source areas. The match to Brimham Rocks proved decisive. The age distributions recorded in the stones aligned with the Brimham geology and excluded the alternatives, including the previously favoured Plumpton Rocks. Just as importantly, the data helped rule out natural transport mechanisms. Glaciers moving through the region during the Ice Age could in principle have carried large boulders across the landscape, and glacial erratics have long been invoked to explain the placement of many megaliths. The evidence from the mineral grains indicates that the Arrows were not glacial visitors but were intentionally selected, moved and erected by human hands.

The scale of that human effort is difficult to overstate. Each of the stones weighs in excess of 25 tonnes, and the tallest members of the row rise to around seven metres above the ground, with a substantial portion of each monolith set into the earth to keep them upright. Moving masses of this size across 18 kilometres of undulating terrain, without wheels, cranes or draught animals, would have required sledges, timber rollers, ropes, earthen ramps and, above all, extraordinary planning and coordination. Dr Anthony Clarke, lead author of the study from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group within Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, emphasised that the logistics alone reveal a society capable of organising labour on a remarkable scale, marshalling hundreds of people over what must have been weeks, months or even years of sustained work.

What makes the new results especially provocative is what they suggest about motivation. If the builders had simply wanted large stones, closer sources were available. The decision to travel to Brimham Rocks instead implies that the source landscape itself carried meaning. Dr Clarke noted that prehistoric people placed real importance on the landscape, and that the location from which the stones came likely held significance for them. Brimham Rocks, with its extraordinary weathered outcrops of Millstone Grit, would have been one of the most visually striking natural places in the region, a landmark that may have been woven into local myth, ritual or identity long before a single stone was cut. In this reading, the Arrows are not merely an engineering achievement but a physical link between two special places, carrying the authority of one landscape into another.

Co-author Dr Jim Leary of the University of York framed the discovery as a fundamental reshaping of how archaeologists understand monument-building in prehistoric Britain. Ancient communities, he argued, were making deliberate and meaningful choices about where their stones came from, choices bound up with landscape, shared belief systems and the social value of effort itself. This perspective aligns with a broader shift in archaeological thinking over recent decades, away from viewing megalithic monuments purely in terms of function or efficiency and towards seeing them as expressions of worldview, memory and communal identity. The journey of a stone from its source to its final resting place may have been as symbolically charged as the monument it ultimately formed, with the act of transport itself serving to bind communities together and to embed the finished structure with stories that everyone involved could recount.

The Devil’s Arrows themselves remain one of the most enigmatic monuments of the British Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Standing in a lowland setting near Boroughbridge, they form a rare example of a stone alignment in such terrain, oriented roughly north to south. Only three stones survive today, though evidence suggests the row may originally have included more. The stones are believed to have been transported and erected during the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, possibly around 2000 BC, a period that also saw the major phases of activity at Stonehenge and other great ceremonial centres. Their sheer height makes them the tallest surviving stone row in Britain, and their presence on the low ground between the rivers Ure and Nidd has invited speculation for centuries about their role in processional routes, territorial markers or astronomical observations, questions that the new geological evidence will now help to reframe.

The research also opens a practical path forward for the study of standing stones everywhere. Because the tape-based sampling method removes nothing visible from the monument, it can be applied to stones whose origins remain unknown, including many of the several hundred megalithic monuments scattered across the British Isles and beyond. Dr Clarke and his colleagues plan to extend the technique to other standing stones with unresolved sources and to conduct targeted excavations at both the Devil’s Arrows and the newly identified source site at Brimham Rocks. Those excavations could recover evidence for the extraction of the stones, traces of the routes they travelled, and dating material that would establish more precisely when the operation took place, turning a geological provenance study into a fuller narrative of one of prehistoric Britain’s most extraordinary construction projects.

For the National Trust, which cares for Brimham Rocks, the discovery forges a direct and unexpected bond between two of Yorkshire’s most celebrated landscapes. Justin Scully, General Manager for Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal and Brimham Rocks, welcomed the research as a new chapter in the story of the stones, one that deepens understanding of the people who shaped this landscape thousands of years ago and adds to the meaning that local communities attach to the Arrows today. The study, titled Deliberate Prehistoric Sourcing of the Devil’s Arrows, Britain’s Tallest Stone Row, stands as a striking demonstration of how modern mineral science can illuminate ancient intention. Four thousand years after the monoliths were raised, the microscopic crystals inside them have testified that their journey was no accident of ice or convenience, but a conscious act of devotion, ambition and skill.

Subject of Research: Provenance of the stones of the Devil's Arrows prehistoric monument in Yorkshire

Article Title: Prehistoric builders hauled 25-tonne stones 18km to build Britain’s tallest stone row

Article References: Prehistoric builders hauled 25-tonne stones 18km to build Britain’s tallest stone row. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Devil's Arrows, Brimham Rocks, Neolithic, megaliths, standing stones, geochronology, zircon dating, North Yorkshire, prehistoric monuments, Curtin University, stone transport, Proceedings of the Royal Society A