Complexity and the politics of evaluation: Reflections on AES2024
Centre staff enjoyed a thought-provoking and enriching week at the Australian Evaluation Society’s 2024 International Evaluation Conference in Melbourne recently (#AES24MEL).
The conference provided a rare and invaluable opportunity for face-to-face discussions and deeper connections with our Pacific Islands and Indigenous partners, who we typically engage with online. Creating spaces that foster in-person relationships is immensely important to us, as it strengthens collaborations and enhances the shared understanding that underpins our collective work.
Research Fellow Alex Gyles co-hosted a well-received workshop with the Warlpiri Education and Training Trust and the Central Land Council on the Yitakimaninjaku, warrirninjaku, payirninjaku manu pina-jarrinjaku ‘Tracking and learning’ project, and presented a paper on the Lajamanu Good Life Project together with Warlpiri researchers and the Central Land Council.
Adjunct Research Fellow Allan Mua Illingworth reflected on ‘Navigating the choppy waters of the evaluation landscape in the Pacific’ together with Eroni Wavu, Fiona Fandim Marat and Mereani Rokotuibau.
Senior Research Fellow Elisabeth Jackson and Adjunct Associate Professor Linda Kelly shared the approach they are taking to understand the impact of the Australia-Indonesia Partnership towards an Inclusive Society (INKLUSI) on empowerment of marginalised communitiesin Indonesia.
These presentations resonated with the perspectives of keynote speakers, including June Oscar’s powerful evocation of Audre Lorde’s essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, and Indy Johar’s call for ‘multi-perspectival pathways for tomorrow’. Both speakers underlined the importance of valuing different ways of knowing and being.
Similarly Elizabeth Hoffecker’skeynote on learning from interventions into complex systems and the dangers of assuming that pathways to impact are simple and linear also rang true for us.
This and other papers at the conference reflect the growing interest among evaluation practitioners in incorporating systems thinking into evaluation approaches. However, it seemed to us – as others have also noted – that these approaches vary between those that characterise systems as more or less predictable and those that deem systems to be inherently unpredictable.
In systems which are seen as largely predictable, evaluation is concerned with identifying and activating the right ‘levers’ for change. In unpredictable systems, evaluation is a means of learning and adjustment which is a practice that resonates strongly with Indigenous and Pacific approaches to knowledge and development.
As outgoing Director Chris Roche reflected following last year’s AES conference in Brisbane, this seems, at least in part, a function of the degree to which these approaches integrate power and politics, including of the evaluative process itself. This has important implications for decolonization efforts in the Pacific, where there is a growing push to challenge external frameworks that may inadvertently reinforce colonial dynamics.
As Ian Scoones and Ian Stirling note in their introduction to the Politics of Uncertainty failing to acknowledge, and indeed embrace, uncertainty not only misreads what can in fact be predicted, but risks foreclosing alternative futures and in so doing ‘the loudest voices and most powerful interests thus come to enjoy a disproportionate influence in defining what is meant by ‘progress’.
And as such we would share the view expressed by many at the conference that the evaluation community needs to be more future oriented, embracing complexity and local knowledge and the role this might play in an increasingly turbulent world. Indeed, we found this orientation, and the recognition of indigenous worldviews and multiple perspectives as a refreshing change from the relatively conservative and often mono-cultural debates on evaluation in the aid and development sector which we have often experienced.
Photo taken by Albie Colvin and used with the permission of AES. From left to right, the people in the photo are Ella Graham (CLC), Rhonda Larry and Glenda Wayne (YWPP), Maisie Kitson (WETT), Alex Gyles (CHSSC) and Jamie Gorman (CLC).
