The contemporary world is a reality of many accelerating and interconnected transformations. This is due to the constant movement of material resources, people, technology, and information. They lead to multiple diffusions, often revolutionary changes, the intensification of multiculturalism and disintegration but also the reintegration of institutional structures, cultures, and communities.

Some of these transformations are spontaneous and exuberant, but some are planned, managed, and intentional. They are the effect of programmed actions, although due to their diversity and often global scale, it is difficult to capture the complexity and multiplicity of connections that characterize them. Their global and macrostructural character is both the effect and the cause of transformations at local levels, the connection of which we see only after applying the analysis of large data sets.

However, this does not mean that these phenomena cannot be influenced; on the contrary, there is an increasing talk of the need for a global policy to change the shape and results of contemporary transformations. This applies not only to climate but also to industrial and agricultural policy, not forgetting educational activities or the protection of cultural heritage, which is understood as the achievements not so much of particular communities but of the broader human race.

To be an active element of this type of impact, following the vocation and specific function of evaluation, we must adapt both the form and strategy of evaluation thinking to these tasks, which, by evaluating various transformational activities and programs, itself seeks the transformation potential present in it. It materializes in the strategy and intention of the evaluation process, defining the values ​​and goals that motivate it through the ways of engaging its participants, and finally, the research methods and techniques.

The fourth and jubilee Congress organized by PTE on the 25th anniversary of establishing the Society wants to contribute to the debate on the necessary way of selecting criteria that are important for this purpose, which, like the general goals of evaluation strategies, are changing civilizationally and constitute an important type of challenge for contemporary evaluation. An important set of criteria is the entire range of values, standards, and needs in the field of sustainable development, i.e., criteria that take into account human-human relations, human-nature-culture, and human-technology-machine relations. There is a need for revitalization of the criteria promoted by democratic and dialogical evaluation, emphasized in the 80., in the form of criteria that take into account the underrepresentation of the vision and values ​​of marginalized, omitted, culturally excluded, or even socially diverse groups, emphasizing the need for inclusive evaluation goals.

Once again, there is a need to look at evaluation as a transformation, especially developmental evaluation, thus combining very different, modern and digitally supported “large-scale” methodologies with “socially sensitive”, “culturally responsive” evaluation, which does not lose its anthropological dimension and can be adequate in a specific context and social heritage, supporting rather than reducing its subjectivity.

Prof. Leszek Korporowicz, Honorary President of the Polish Evaluation Society