Rethinking evaluation - Is relevance still relevant?

In last week's #WhatWorks post, I argued that it was perhaps time for us in the evaluation community to rethink our evaluation criteria.  After nearly 15 years of applying relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability as our foundational evaluation criteria, is now the time to change or adapt?

The evaluation criterion “relevance” has troubled me for quite some time. In many development settings, a project is considered relevant when “the aid activity is suited to the priorities and policies of the target group, recipient and donor.” Of course, this is important. In plain language, it makes us question whether the intervention aimed to address real needs.