Social Impact, Search for Common Ground, and the William Davidson Institute at University of Michigan have partnered with the U.S. Global Development Lab at USAID, to test the developmental evaluation (DE) approach through the Developmental Evaluation Pilot Activity (DEPA-MERL). This session will explore preliminary findings within and across the pilots in the USAID context, related to three research questions posed: 1) How is DE able to capture and promote use of emergent learnings in support of ongoing development of programming? 2) What are the barriers and enablers to DE implementation? 3) What do key informants’ consider to be the value (added or lost) of conducting a DE versus a traditional evaluation? During the session, the team will provide an overview of the qualitative methods used to answer these research questions.