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.
by Jade Maloney, Sharon-Marra Brown, Alexandra Lorigan and Rosie Dale
At AES22, ARTD Consultants' Jade Maloney, Sharon Marra-Brown, Alexandra Lorigan and Holly Kovak presented on a panel with peer researchers, Kirsty Rosie and Rosie Dale, on the practicalities of co-evaluating with lived and living experience (LLE) researchers.
Co-evaluation like co-design is informed by the principle of 'nothing about us, without us.' While co-design recognises the rights of people with lived experience to shape the policies and programs that affect their lives and the way this strengthens policy, co-evaluation recognises the expertise that people with lived experience bring to designing measures of success, collecting data and making sense of findings and the way this can strengthen evaluation.
by AES QLD Committee Members
Evaluators in the AES network are increasingly being challenged to apply evaluative thinking, methods and tools to innovative, emergent, place-based or otherwise complex initiatives. These initiatives often seek to achieve improvements not only in individuals and institutions, but in the systems that hold 'wicked' societal problems in place. The desired systems-level outcomes are often difficult to define, predict and measure and can change and evolve as the implementing organisations learn which strategies are most effective in reaching their goal.
In response, a recent issue of the AES QLD regional committee's newsletter focussed on resources, methods and mindsets to support members to in evaluating complex systems change initiatives. Here are the take-outs.
by Charlie Tulloch
As we move into 2021 after an interrupted 2020, it is a good time to reflect on the place of evaluators in the working world. It is clear that many sectors and vocations have been forced to significantly upscale, downscale or adapt to changing economic and global circumstances.
Fortunately for us, there remains a central role for evaluation to play in the face of increasing challenges, demanding an ongoing need for analysis of policy and program successes and failures. Indeed, evaluators now face an increasingly diverse set of choices when it comes to defining their career directions.
The final Australian Evaluation Society's Victorian seminar of 2020 explored this topic in depth, drawing on the wisdom and experiences of six fantastic evaluators of different ages, genders, study backgrounds and vocational sectors (academia, private, government, international development, philanthropy). This article reflects on the insights from this session.
by Alison Rogers
Once upon a time there was a diverse range of animals working hard to run a productive farm. Among the committed and dedicated team there were five dogs. In addition to retrieving, herding, and sniffing for wild produce, their role was to guard the premises. The dogs were friendly to the milkmaid and grocer, but for some reason, they growled and barked at the postal worker.
One day, when the postal worker was due to deliver mail, four of the dogs were distracted by a commotion on the other side of the farm. No one was watching the mailbox except for the dog known as Champ. He stayed by the gate, as he was meant to do. He observed the postal worker walk closer, and when she made no attempt to enter the premises, he stayed quietly vigilant and let her get on with her job. Champ even started wagging his tail.
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.