Robbie is a proven evidence, learning and complexity expert and team leader with over 20 years’ experience. He designs and operationalises innovative yet practical monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) frameworks that help organisations understand and address complex challenges — building their capacity to become evidence-based, collaborative sense-making and adaptive-learning organisations.

He works across diverse complex adaptive systems — from locally-led adaptation to low-carbon transition — and extensively in knowledge services, supporting knowledge networks, think-tanks, communities of practice and policy-advocacy platforms. Alongside leading strategic and impact evaluations, he facilitates MEL design and capacity-building in cross-cultural settings, designing systems from the ground up and building teams’ capabilities through trust, collaboration and buy-in.

Robbie pioneered Sophoi’s signature approach, ESLA Loops — Evidence Sense-making Learning Action Loops — a way of using evidence to inform learning and action on complex challenges, valuing the sense-making ‘process’ as much as the evaluation ‘product’. Increasingly he combines it with AI-enabled evidence synthesis, so that human-centred conversations are supported by a rigorous, rapid learning infrastructure.

Recent clients include the Clean Air Fund, the Adaptation Fund, the Pacific Institute, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, ClientEarth, the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group, the World Bank, IUCN, FILE, Luminate, Climate-KIC, the World Green Building Council, the Mastercard Foundation and CIFF. Between 2014 and 2018 he was Head of MEL for the £140m DFID BRACED programme.

Robbie sits on two evaluation expert advisory panels — the International Committee of the Red Cross Expert Panel and the FCDO EQuALS Expert Panel. He is based near Brighton in the UK and holds an MSc (Distinction) from SOAS, University of London.