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International community development involves complex, dynamic processes. Evaluation capacity building (ECB) designed to promote evaluative thinking among community development practitioners can foster more complexity‐aware monitoring and evaluation for learning and adaptive management. Instead of simply executing technical processes based on predetermined plans, development practitioners can be “knowledge workers” who use evaluative thinking to promote collaboration, learning, and adaptation. In this chapter, framed in the context of the United States Agency for International Development's ongoing efforts to become a more effective learning organization, we describe one such ECB initiative implemented by Catholic Relief Services in Zambia, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The chapter provides reflections on a practical application and empirical grounding of theoretical concepts related to complexity‐aware and learning‐focused evaluation.

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Development organizations who aim to improve program outcomes and ensure increased accountability to communities are under increasing pressure to better understand the experiences of project participants. There is much discussion across the aid community (including, but not limited to, aquatic agricultural research) about opportunities and challenges to adapting planning, monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) approaches in order to improve their relevance and applicability to complex and unpredictable development processes. This article is therefore timely and relevant in describing a Theory of Change (TOC)-based approach to address complexity in a practical and transformative way. The CGIAR Research Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems (AAS) used a TOC-based approach to design and establish an ''intelligent'' PM&E system that supported complexity-aware programming addressing the evolving needs and interests of poor and marginalized people in five locations in southern Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The AAS program also intended to empower