Many of the problems that students at MIIS want to work on are structural, complex (meaning non-linear), have long success horizons (i.e., no 1-5 year project can truly solve them), and are only partially amenable to standard approaches and methodologies for assessing impact. Indeed, the difficulty of “measuring” structural progress in things like racial, economic, gender, and climate justice incentivizes projects and programs with short time spans, highly quantified “outputs” and “outcomes” which can be successful during their life spans but frequently fail to produce long-term impacts. Our class will a) unpack the reasons for a reliance on project modalities in social development work (spoiler: it’s not because donors or public officials or NGO leaders are stupid), and b) introduce learners – at a conceptual level – to 8 approaches to assessing impact in complex, nonlinear, emergent contexts, approaches that can help us avoid “dumbing down” projects to measuring that which can be quantified, or counted.