Abstract
As evaluators, we agree that our practices must be ethical and that evaluations make some kind of value judgment about what is being evaluated. Beyond these generalizations, agreement is less certain. The term ethics is defined as a set of moral principles, often ones relating to a specified group, field, or form of conduct, that guide an individual’s or group’s behavior. But what exactly constitutes ethical practice? Whose interests are evaluators ethically obligated to serve? Recognizing that values represent beliefs or ideals shared by the members of a culture about what is good or desirable, in a pluralistic world what are the obligations of evaluators in the selection of which values are to be privileged in an evaluation? And, on what basis are evaluators to make judgments of what is “better” or an “improvement” (including, for whom and under what circumstances)?
The answers to these questions will often depend on the contexts involved, but the evaluation community can benefit from ongoing discussions around them. This section of American Journal of Evaluation (AJE) is concerned with these issues, with different section editors addressing them in a variety of ways. For this current editorial cycle of AJE, we as section editors are choosing to expand the discussion to include issues related to both ethics and values—to consider the range of issues related to principles, values, or ideals that guide our practices as evaluators. Our goal is to promote a dialogue among diverse voices grounded in diverse perspectives with regard to methodology, clientele, and ideology. We plan to have this section appear twice a year in AJE, generally alternating every other issue.
We are fortunate in being able to begin this series with an article by Eleanor Chelimsky on the values involved in serving the public interest. Professional evaluators have obligations, both contractual and ethical, to serve the needs of evaluation funders and sponsors and other identified stakeholders, but the mission and value statements of the American Evaluation Association also are explicit in highlighting the ethical imperative for evaluators to serve the public interest. What is the public interest and what are the ways that evaluators can best serve this interest? These are complex questions, with good reasons for our lack of clarity in answering them. Nonetheless, as the evaluation profession matures and continues growing, we are more aware of the challenges in addressing in practice the lofty goal of serving what is considered to be the public interest.
Dr. Chelimsky’s long experience as an evaluator in government and not-for-profit agencies—at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, she ran the Program Evaluation and Methodology Division, doing evaluations for Congress and working to improve evaluation methodologies—affords her a unique perspective on public interest concerns. Her article focuses on the relationships between the public interest and sustainability of programs and the resulting implications for appropriate practice. She “looks at the sometimes conflicting values implicit in the construct of ‘the public interest’,” considering how our view of the public interest changes over time and historical events, sometimes due to politics, sometimes due to the influence of special interests (or “factions” as Chelimsky cites James Madison as referencing) but also often due to changes in our understanding of the complexities involved.
One of these evolving developments in understanding is the sustainability of programs, typically now seen as essential to any hope for truly serving the public interest. More from failure than success, we now understand that it takes time for programs to mature, to align with their contexts, to undergo a process of accommodation that allows them to address more than short-term goals. That is, program sustainability and the factors that influence it are increasingly relevant in evaluation. Chelimsky takes on this difficult topic in an attempt “to find some unifying concept that would allow evaluators to encompass the issue of sustainability within an evaluation framework.” The result is an organization of what we think we know about the public interest, leading to a set of recommendations for both the craft of evaluation and our research on evaluation. We invite you to read and appreciate this article and to become engaged in the dialogue as it develops in the years ahead.