This week, we received the sad news that Thomas A. Schwandt passed away during the Christmas period. Tom was a huge contributor to and supporter of the European Evaluation Society. His keynote speech in Thessaloniki on Post Normal Evaluation was hugely influential and he was actively remained involved in our community debates. We admired him greatly and remember him as a person of wisdom, integrity, and intellectual leadership. We asked Tineke A. Abma, who has collaborated closely with Tom over the years, to write an obituary.

 

Peter van der Knaap and May Pettigrew, present and past president of the EES –

In memoriam Thomas A. Schwandt

Thomas Schwandt can be considered a unique, critical philosophical voice in the field of evaluation. His well-reading, integrity, friendship and scholarly work have been an enduring source of joy and inspiration for many scholars and practitioners, including me. I met Tom for the first time in 1990 during an exchange program between the Erasmus and Indiana University in Bloomington, and we kept befriended and in touch over the years. I remember us driving in a small second-car across the city of Rotterdam in the nineties. Cities and urban studies intrigued him, especially how people tried to make a good living in precarious circumstances. He was always a wonderful conversation partner, well informed about politics, open-minded and interested in what other people were thinking and doing.

Tom identified himself as a teacher, more so than an expert or scholar, and he was a very fine teacher. One who tried to work in the German tradition of Bildung. No wonder that ‘Dead Poets Society’ was his favourite movie; Robbie Williams acts as the inspirational teacher John Keating who is engaged with the professional and moral identity formation of his students. Although Tom was trained as a theologian he entered the field of evaluation. Much to our luck, because he enriched the field with thoughts from the humanities tradition including hermeneutics, phenomenology, politics, ethics and the arts. Given his interest in Continental philosophy Tom felt very much at home in Europe, and he was a regular visitor of the European Evaluation Society. The festive dinners we had in Berlin, London, Lausanne, Sevilla, Thessaloniki were always something to look forward to, because of the rich conversations among Tom, Helen Simons, Jennifer Greene, Christina Segerholm and Peter Dahler-Larsen.

His critical and though-provoking questions challenged the conventional framing of evaluation, and he was one of the leading scholars who developed a vision on what he later called ‘post-normal evaluation.’ Personally, I appreciate ‘Evaluation Reconsidered’ as one of his best books, because it elaborates on evaluation as a particular form of pedagogy embedded within practices of teachers, medical doctors, carers, urban planners. Not standing above them, but facilitating deliberative dialogues with multiple stakeholders to find and reflect on the goodness of their practice. Developing the kind of knowledge required to answer the question, “What should I/we do?” in circumstances where the available stock of technical knowledge is of little direct help.

This In Memoriam is written in honour of his erudition, vision and ideas, particularly his outspoken call for one’s value engagement as an evaluator. He stated that evaluation is not a technical, but value-laden practice, and that evaluators’ should therefore not hide behind a mask of value neutrality, but instead be open about the values and voices they want to promote in their practice. The important question, according to Tom, then becomes not, did a program reach its goals, but the aim of evaluating is to answer the question: “Given what we know and what we can imagine is possible, what should we do now?”

It is this question that still triggers the evaluation community after so many years, because it contradicts well-rehearsed notions about evaluation as an impartial, value neutral and expert[1]driven enterprise. Tom was and remained an advocate of democratic pluralism, complexity thinking, deliberative pedagogy, practical reasoning (phronesis) and social justice throughout his career. This was not just a matter of scholarly and intellectual debate. He embodied and lived by these values, and actively brought them into practice. This made him not only a respectable scholar, but also a great person and a fine teacher.

Prof. Tineke A. Abma, Porfessor Arts & Health at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Professor Older People’s participation at Leiden University Medical Centre and Executive Director of Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing.

January 2026