CECAN Fellowship: Embedding Complexity-Informed Approaches in the Evaluation of Public Institutions
Public institutions increasingly operate within dynamic governance environments characterised by overlapping mandates, interdependent processes, multiple stakeholders, evolving policy objectives, and rapidly changing political and regulatory contexts. Many public organisations and agencies can therefore be understood as complex adaptive systems, shaped by continuous interaction, adaptation, and feedback across internal and external governance structures. Yet institutional evaluations often continue to rely on relatively linear and standardised approaches centred on fixed indicators, static intervention logics, and simplified causal assumptions. Such approaches may struggle to adequately capture organisational adaptation, stakeholder interdependencies, emergent outcomes, and the broader systemic conditions within which institutions operate. This fellowship addresses the challenge of how complexity-informed approaches can be more effectively embedded within the evaluation of public institutions and agencies. In doing so, it seeks to bridge complexity-informed thinking, institutional governance, and applied evaluation practice by exploring how evaluation design can become more responsive to different forms of institutional complexity. The fellowship will contribute to developing more adaptive and systems-sensitive approaches to evaluating public institutions, helping ensure that evaluation methods better reflect the realities of governance in complex policy environments.
About David
Dr David Alemna is a public policy evaluator, researcher, and lecturer with a particular interest in applying complexity-informed approaches to improve the evaluation of public institutions operating in complex governance environments. He is a Senior Consultant at ICF, where he designs and delivers evaluations and impact assessments for UK Government and European Commission clients across a wide range of policy areas. Alongside his consultancy work, David is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, where he teaches public policy, public administration, and research methods. He holds a PhD in Public Policy, and his research and professional work focus on complexity-informed evaluation, institutional governance, and methodological approaches for evaluating complex policy environments. David is passionate about bridging academic research and evaluation practice to develop complexity-informed, systems-sensitive approaches that better reflect how public institutions operate in the real world.
