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.

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.

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.

It made me wonder if there wasn't a more automated and digital way to do this work. While doing some basic research, I discovered a number of platforms that usually came with a very high price tag, far out of my client's reach. Our organisation's goal is to use our natural curiosity and focus on effectively using technology to simplify and solve complex problems in order to assist organisations in reaching their full potential. So, I collaborated with leading social innovation guru, Tracy Collier to learn about the typical steps in a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Program and to identify some free tools that can be used at each stage.