If we’ve ever chatted about research and reporting, you know my gripe about evaluation reports that are never revisited. It is a missed opportunity to learn something genuinely useful about whether your organisation is actually changing anything.

Across the impact sector, evaluation is often treated as a reporting obligation rather than a strategic tool. The result is a sector that spends significant resources measuring its work without fundamentally improving it. That cycle can be broken. But it requires starting with a different framing.

Recently, I had a great conversation on the Social Norms Chat podcast about something I’ve become increasingly passionate about: how artificial intelligence can transform how we design and deliver social and behaviour change programmes. If you’re working in international development or any field where understanding human behaviour matters, this is worth paying attention to.

If I had to describe my 2025 work in one sentence, it would be this: applied social and behavioural science is moving upstream.

This year I’ve worked across vaccine uptake in Cameroon, safety and accountability in nightlife settings in Georgia, and national social protection behavioural design in Rwanda, along with a number of assignments around team capacity building.

On paper, these look like very different assignments. In practice, they all asked the same question: what has to be true in a person’s day-to-day reality for the desired behaviour to become the easiest, safest, most normal thing to do?

So, as we head into 2026, here are the shifts I’m seeing and the ones I’m hoping we will accelerate.