Book excerpt: "This handbook brings together evaluation approaches relevant across the program life cycle, starting from program design, to implementation, and ultimately to the scaling up of successful interventions. It fills a gap in available publications, which are predominantly focused on impact evaluations and inadequately grounded in methods that can address why programs succeed or fail as well as their potential to contribute to broader and more systemic change. This chapter starts by setting the context and describes key questions relevant to each stage of the program lifecycle. The second section highlights four cross-cutting consideration that social programs today must confront including: (1) ensuring culturally responsive and equitable evaluations, (2) the decolonization of evaluation practices, (3) adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic and other global health crises, and (4) understanding the impact of climate change on social programs. The last section describes how this handbook can be used and highlights relevant evaluation topics and case studies covered in each section of the handbook"--