I came across the edited book Ethics for Evaluation, by leading international authors Rob van den Berg, Penny Hawkins and Nicolette Stame (2021) when preparing a workshop proposal with AES Fellow John Stoney, for an ANZEA conference in 2024. We wanted to get people talking about being resilient in the face of the political cycles that are the complex backdrop to our work.
While this book is about ethics, it's also about something else really important: what supports resilience.
How evaluations are commissioned affects a wide range of people involved with both the activity being evaluated and the process of the evaluation. The funder has a lot at stake to ascertain the benefit of the activity[1] and the cost of the evaluation. So too, do other parties and participants who value the activity and/or contribute their time, knowledge and experience to the evaluation.
This is the first of three blogs emerging from a workshop about commissioning organised by the AES Fellows at the 2025 AES conference. It complements other recent presentations about alternatives to traditional methods of procurement of evaluations.
[1] The generic term 'activity' is used to incorporate: program, service, strategy, event, facility, system
A conversation with clients this week started me thinking.
They raised a concern that's circulating widely in professional and academic circles:
That generations of people who grow up using AI from birth will gradually lose
their capacity for critical thinking.
13 November 2025: Early on a dark Copenhagen morning, from a converted courthouse holding cell, systems-MEL thinker and evaluator Zazie Tolmer joined Squirrel Main for a lively conversation about the newly released MEL 360 Systems Guide.
Community First Development has announced the release of its new guide, Right Way Evaluation: Telling Our Own Stories of Change, designed to support practitioners, researchers, and governments working in partnership with First Nations' peoples. This guide offers a culturally responsive approach to monitoring, evaluation and learning, centered on self-determination, community leadership and strengths-based practice.
By Squirrel Main, Eleanor Williams, Kristy Hornby, Mandy Charman
Everyday ethical challenges for evaluators
Ethics are part and parcel of any evaluation journey. Every evaluator, at some point, will face tricky situations where they'll need to balance ethical principles with practical decisions. While formal ethics processes usually revolve around consent and transparency in evaluation design, the real challenges often pop up beyond that. Evaluators frequently work in environments full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (known as 'VUCA' conditions), which means we need to stay flexible and responsive throughout the entire evaluation process to keep things on track.
A lot of the discussions about ethics in evaluation in Australia seem to centre on meeting the requirements of the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and the needs of Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs). But the less glamorous, day-to-day ethical challenges we face when we're actually designing, delivering, and reporting on evaluations tend to get less attention. This post provides early thinking on a basic framework for evaluators who want to think about their own ethical decision-making and kickstart a conversation about whether more guidance, advice, or support is needed.
By Thushara Dibley and Lena Etuk
Australia is a culturally and linguistically diverse country. According to the 2021 census nearly half of all Australians (48%) had at least one parent born overseas, and nearly one third (28%) were themselves born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022a; 2022b). One fifth of Australians (22%) speak a language other than English at home. Of those, 15% have low English proficiency (almost 1 million people) (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022a). These statistics make it clear that Australia is a culturally, linguistically and ethnically rich and complex country.
By Eleanor Williams and Skye Trudgett
Most people who have worked in evaluation have some kind of picture in their head of what it feels like when an evaluation partnership is going well. There are some common threads – a clear scope of work which has been well communicated, well-mapped aims and desired outcomes for the program, and easily-accessed data to allow for evaluative judgements to be made. The relationship between commissioner and evaluator might be described as professional but friendly with regular and frank communication flowing in both directions. Everyone involved in the evaluation – including those delivering and receiving the policy or program – have the opportunity to genuinely contribute to the evaluation and benefit from its findings.
We acknowledge the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this nation. We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands in which we conduct our business. We pay our respects to ancestors and Elders, past and present. We are committed to honouring Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ unique cultural and spiritual relationships to the land, waters and seas and their rich contribution to society.