In one embodiment, the invention is a method and apparatus for distributed policy evaluation. One embodiment of a method for evaluating a systems management policy, where the policy includes a condition and an action to be taken when the condition evaluates to TRUE, includes forwarding the policy, by a first autonomic manager, to a second autonomic manager and receiving at the first autonomic manager at least partial evaluation results for the condition from a third autonomic manager. The first autonomic manager, the second autonomic manager, and the third autonomic manager are arranged in a ring configuration such that the evaluating occurs in a cascading manner, and only the first autonomic manager has access to a policy storage from which the policy is retrieved.