Sustainable tourism interventions, as tools fostering social change and the preservation of natural and cultural assets, are inherently complex. Yet, due to the traditional understanding of tourism as a mere tool for economic growth, the tourism literature has placed little focus on evidencing how tourism policy interventions can act as catalysts for positive change at a destination level. Creating this body of knowledge on tourism policy is instrumental to increase transferability and adaptability of interventions to similar contexts in other destinations. Theory of Change and Most Significant Change technique are two qualitative, participatory methods of evaluation that help to better understand how tourism interventions work in creating change, particularly, taking into account the pivotal role played by human agency. We show how participatory methods promote a culture of evaluation that supports the learning process of project implementers throughout their endeavours of evidencing impacts. Moreover, by focusing on the learning aspect of evaluations, participatory approaches help eliminate the negative attitudes often associated with evaluation that result from the fear of being judged on performance, and from the need to evidence success to funders at all costs. Theory of Change (ToC) and Most Significant Change are two complexity-aware evaluation approaches that allow organisations in receipt of funding to actively co-create an evaluation strategy ex-ante, and monitor change at interim stages throughout the project implementation period. Placing project implementers in control of their evaluation from the beginning, instead of leaving this task to be completed ex-post or when it is too late to make changes, can help steer an intervention towards desired outcomes. In this sense, we demonstrate how ToC can be applied as a useful planning, process and impact evaluation tool, whilst MSC helps build-up a narrative about how change was experienced by an intervention's beneficiaries, shedding light on the wider impact of tourism interventions through a story-based technique.