The Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus

The Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) has been transforming the practice of policy evaluation across the food, energy, water and environmental domains, to make it fit for a complex world since 2016. We have achieved this through pioneering, testing and promoting innovative policy evaluation approaches with UK Government departments.

We are also delivering a technical training programme, CPD courses, specialist workshops, publications, webinars and seminars to demonstrate the challenges of evaluation in real world situations. Our Fellowship Programme has provided opportunities for those from Government and industry to forge useful and lasting connections with researchers and for CECAN’s work to be informed by and linked closely to practical evaluation.

We will continue to refine complex appropriate evaluation methods in the nexus domains and apply them to public health, wellbeing, the local natural environment and enterprise domains in partnership with national, regional and local government, nongovernment funders and the third sector and expand our technical training, workshop, publication and webinar programmes, sharing our specialist knowledge and skills to further develop the capacity of those working on UK policy evaluation.

CECAN Ltd is the commercial arm of  CECAN. It delivers contracted  evaluation research and bespoke training courses. If you would like CECAN Ltd to undertake work for you, please contact admin@cecan.co.uk

Missed the CECAN Conference 2026: Global Perspectives on Complex Evaluation? Catch up on the discussions with policy evaluation experts from the US & Europe. 🔗 Head over to our videos page to watch the recordings: www.cecan.ac.uk/videos/ #PolicyEvaluation #Complexity

[image or embed]

— CECAN (@cecan.bsky.social) July 13, 2026 at 3:17 PM

In case you missed our latest webinar: 'Testing, Learning and Adapting: Introducing the New Test and Learn Annex to the Magenta Book', presented by Dr Gloria Crabolu, a recording is now available on the CECAN website: www.cecan.ac.uk/videos/

[image or embed]

— CECAN (@cecan.bsky.social) June 25, 2026 at 9:21 AM

News

CECAN Conference 2024

On 4th June 2024, CECAN hosted it’s 2024 Conference ‘Looking Back and Looking Forward: Closing the loop from evaluation to policy making’ at the prestigious Royal Academy Of Engineering.

CECAN Update (July 2023)

Take a look at our latest CECAN update to find out more about what we’ve been working on and activities coming soon.

Upcoming Events

CECAN Webinar – Place-Based Evaluation Is Missing the Point About Place

In this session, Matt Healey shares the outcomes of his CECAN Fellowship, which set out to connect place theory, complexity science, and evaluation methodology. The result is the Some of Place framework, comprising nine dimensions of place (the ‘Nine Ps’), the ‘space between’ where emergent outcomes are generated, ‘time bounding’ across multiple temporalities, and ‘some-ness’ – a principled form of epistemic humility recognising that any evaluation captures only some of what matters in a place.

Videos

Reflecting and Learning: Using Contribution Analysis

Cynefin – Navigating Uncertainty

Share This