Given my 17-year long experience in evaluation, what are the top tips I would give to Young and Emerging Evaluators - the YEEs who will be responsible in future for the commissioning and doing of evaluations? We need change in our evaluation systems, so here are my first five priorities
Can evaluation help enable and support transformative development? We know we need the latter. Yet like sustainability, transformation (or transformative change) and transformative development are these days frequently dismissed as 'buzzwords' (or even worse, as 'fuzzwords'). This is a very big mistake. These are extremely important
Many years ago, at the beginning of my evaluation career, I read about 'dialogue evaluation'. It is a simple mechanism that we can use more frequently to mediate between an independent evaluation and self-evaluation - two distinct approaches that many see as incompatible. Dialogue evaluation (see below) can
Evaluators' power and influence are limited. There are several reasons for this situation. One relates to how our craft is framed. We are used to 'selling' evaluation/M&E as serving accountability, decision-making, learning and knowledge generation. Yet evaluation is still frequently perceived as something
Definitions of terms are crucial for common understanding in any field of human endeavour. The diversity of actors entering and playing on the evaluation field is both an advantage and a disadvantage - including in the fact that we do not have a common language. It is both frustrating and enriching
How good are we at defining and judging 'success' - the essence of what evaluators do? Let us consider a pertinent example: Every year the aid industry spends a quarter of its funding, around US$15 billion, on 'capacity development' (CD). So-called 'state-building'
There are no evaluators this week in Davos. We are clearly not among the most powerful in the world. Yet I have always hoped that the very nature of our practice would enable us to contribute significantly and visibly to solving our day to day development challenges, as well as
As the powerful gather in Davos this week, it is a good time to reflect on the WEF's excellent Global Risks Report 2018. The report reminds us that as evaluators we have to engage with the larger context within which we attempt to contribute to the wellbeing of
I argued that the DAC criteria should get due credit. As noted in Part 1 of this series, they have been useful in many ways. Most importantly, they drew our attention to important aspects that we need to consider whenever we evaluate in the development space. The DAC criteria had
Evaluation criteria used in development contexts do not only show what evaluation commissioners, evaluators and other stakeholders value. They also provide an indication of the issues that could - and likely should - be a focus in the design and implementation of development interventions (i.e., projects, programmes, policies, events, relationships such
