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In France, in a context of growing health inequalities, the need for action on life settings and, more broadly, on the social determinants of health (SDH), requires a contribution from health promotion research. Today’s challenge is not only to design interventions tailored to contexts and actively targeting SDH, but also to develop innovative evaluation strategies of these complex interventions. A group of researchers and representatives from funding agencies met in Paris on June 2nd, 2014 to discuss current experiences conducted in France. The debates yielded five conclusions: (i) the context of the intervention must be considered as one of its active ingredients, (ii) evaluation must be guided by a sound intervention logic (iii) randomized controlled trials cannot capture the complexity of the environment and evaluation must be designed using alternative models, including process evaluation, (iv) interventional research should be collaborative, or co-constructed, (v) public health training should cover the diversity of evaluative methods. The conclusions described here, in the context of France, stress that to address these challenges, funding agencies, researchers and stakeholders should further engage in discussions concerning the conduct of interventional research, evaluation and implementation of complex public health interventions.