Decolonising global health evaluations: A scoping review of methodological frameworks

The field of global health evaluation is critiqued for its reliance on Eurocentric paradigms that perpetuate epistemic injustice. A rapidly evolving yet conceptually fragmented literature on decolonising evaluation has emerged in response. We conducted a scoping review to chart the nature and breadth of this literature and synthesise insights to guide future evaluation scholarship and practice. Academic database searches identified 1,024 records, of which 732 were screened at title and abstract following deduplication. Combined with 138 records from grey literature and citation searches, a total of 653 reports were assessed at full text, from which 59 records were included in the final synthesis. Our synthesis reveals that the literature points in two concurrent, dialectical and complementary theoretical projects: the first involving the deconstruction of colonial systems, and the second the (re)construction of decolonial and Indigenous-centred alternatives. We organised our findings into a typology that illustrates a spectrum of praxis in global public health evaluation, which moves from minimal adaptation of dominant methodological approaches to a more profound philosophical and political reorientation of practice. This paper calls for greater conceptual precision in the description of chosen approaches to prevent the co-optation of decolonial language and the need for empirical research to bridge the gap between theory and practice.