Abstract
Theme: Evaluating to make a difference: Achieving results through learning and accountability London 17–18 April 2013
Arguments
The theme of the conference points to a well-known duality and a split of focus in evaluation practice and it also points to an inevitable combination of functions. The keynote speech by Professor Denise Lievesley from Kings College brought attention to trust and ethics. Evaluation needs to serve both accountability and learning and the one presumes the other. Can there be accountability without learning? No. Can there be learning that does not also serve accountability? No. That being said, the actual practice of evaluation can – through its choice of methods and the design of the process – be more focused on the one than on the other. Well-designed evaluation processes and an appropriate institutional framework enable evaluation to serve both masters. Trust and ethics are vital ingredients.
Keys
The parallel sessions were organized under four keywords. Most sessions were in ‘Embedding evaluation in organizations’, several others in ‘Assessing impact’ and somewhat fewer in ‘Promoting change and innovation’. There were two sessions on ‘Real time evaluation’. The choice of themes reflects the overarching question of the conference. While the ‘embedding’ sessions mostly spoke to the organizational design questions, the ‘impact’ sessions addressed the roots of both learning and accountability – the trustworthiness of data and analysis.
Tendencies
While in the past there have been advocates for specific design, methods and purposes of evaluation, the overall mood in this conference appeared to be one of synthesis and diversity. Several presentations in the ‘impact sessions’ discussed hard and difficult questions on advocacy and normative work. Judging by the presentations, the community’s focus has moved from the gold standards and experimental methods toward a broadly informed debate and practice on methodological choice and adaptation to context and purpose.
Challenges
The keynote speech by Ben Ramalingam of the Overseas Development Institute presented the notion of complexity and its consequences for evaluators. Judging by the presentation, there’s much that remains to do and few lessons to be shared and learned to date. The sessions on ‘Promoting change and innovation’ partly responded to the complexity challenge, but often innovation has a more practical and immediate target.
Symbols
A large, beautiful red fox came walking by the main entrance at the end of the conference. I interpret it as a symbol of how the community is becoming more fox-like, in terms of Isaiah Berlins neat categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (Isaiah Berlin [1953] The Hedgehog and the Fox. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson).