Insights from a study by Lyn Pleger and Franz Leeuw

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.