Rethinking How We Judge Global Health Work

Many evaluations of global health projects rely on ideas that come mainly from Europe and North America. This approach can push aside other ways of knowing and create unfairness in knowledge.

Scholars have started to question this pattern and have produced a growing body of work on decolonising evaluation. To map this work, researchers ran a scoping review. They searched academic databases and found 1,024 records. After removing duplicates, 732 records were screened by title and abstract. Adding 138 reports from grey literature and citation chasing gave 653 full‑text reports to examine. From these, 59 studies were kept for the final synthesis.

The analysis showed two linked strands of thought. One strand tries to take apart colonial structures that still shape evaluation methods. The other strand works on rebuilding evaluation using decolonial and Indigenous‑centered ideas. The authors arranged these ideas into a typology that shows a range of practice. At one end are small adjustments to existing tools; at the other end are deep shifts in philosophy and politics.

The paper urges writers to be precise when they label their approach, so the term decolonising is not used loosely or taken over by unrelated projects. It also stresses the need for empirical studies that test how these new ideas work in real settings, bridging the gap between theory and everyday practice.