aes24 International Evaluation Conference

Welcome to Country & Smoking Ceremony

Opening address: Kiri Parata, President, Australian Evaluation Society

Keynote address: "Wiyi Yani U Thangani - re-imagining evaluation with a gender justice lens"

June Oscar AO

As the first woman to be the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, June led the ground-breaking national project, Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices). In March 2024, the Wiyi Yani U Thangani Institute for First Nations Gender Justice was launched at the Australian National University to carry the legacy of the project—which has gathered a powerful evidence base of the rights, issues and aspirations of thousands of First Nations women and girls.
The Institute is developing an applied measurement, evaluation and learning approach formed by the voices and cultures of First Nations women and girls. This approach will guarantee that women can own their own evidence and identify areas of research which respond to their strengths and priorities. June’s address will explore this unique approach and how evaluation methods shaped by women’s voices can lead to systemic transformation benefiting all Australians.

Professor, International Development, University of Bath, UK

As evaluators, we are often asked to find out ‘what caused what’ in the past, but also resist being labelled solely as hired evidence collectors. I argue for further effort to move beyond ‘what worked?’ to ‘what next?’- from outcome-activity links in the past to scenario-action possibilities and options in the future. Anticipatory evaluation can enhance the relevance and usefulness of our work, but also accentuates the challenges of appropriate framing, causal analysis, normative deliberation, and influencing. It increases uncertainty, recasts stakeholder relationships, and requires use of a wider range of complexity-informed methods. I explore these issues by reflecting on the scope for anticipatory evaluative practice in four diverse fields, each at a different level: planning doctoral research (interpersonal), appraising impact investment (organisational), mainstreaming social policy initiatives (national), and rethinking development (global). Becoming more future-oriented makes new demands on each of us as evaluation professionals, but also requires collective action to build stronger bridges with communities of practice in anticipatory action, appraisal, foresight, and future thinking.

Lead Research Scientist, Local Innovation Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA

What does a wayfinding approach look like when seeking to learn from and evaluate interventions into complex systems? 

Many of the most intractable challenges facing communities around the world are system challenges requiring system-level responses. Development-focused donors and implementers at various levels are recognizing this and funding system-strengthening and systems-change work across a variety of systems. Monitoring, evaluation, and learning work, however, has traditionally been focused at the project level, not the level of the dynamic local systems in which projects operate. A new kind of evaluation is needed for this work and is in the early stages of being developed, tested, and improved through learning-by-doing.

In forums such as the UNDP’s M&E Sandbox and the BMGF-funded Systems Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation initiative, development donors, implementers, and evaluators are asking questions such as: what evaluation designs and approaches are most suitable for learning from and evaluating system and portfolio-level interventions? And “how do we know if we are making progress, generating results, and contributing to positive change in a complex system?”
Drawing on experience implementing “complexity-aware” evaluations of system-change interventions in Northern India and Guatemala, this session develops and explores responses to these questions. The presentation shares an evaluation approach and six related tools that are being used to evaluate, learn, and implement adaptively in these two very different system contexts. The tools--while humble and likely familiar--can become powerful wayfinding instruments for navigating complexity when combined with a systems-informed evaluation design. This session introduces this approach through a keynote presentation and then further develops it through an interactive panel with systems-informed evaluators working both internationally and domestically in Australia.

Indy Johar, RIBA register architect, serial social entrepreneur, and Good Growth Advisor to the Mayor of London, UK

Abstract to follow.

More details of the closing plenary, including panelists, to be confirmed.

John Gargani, President of Gargani + Company, former President of the American Evaluation Association, USA

As the AES 2024 conference comes to a close, we gather one last time to consider the journey ahead. We seek a destination none have seen—a profession that in ten years’ time fully supports societal and planetary health—along a path we have never traveled. The urgency of existential threats such as AI, global heating, and pandemics call into question the traditional ways our profession has navigated the future. And new players such as impact investors, social entrepreneurs, effective altruists, and socially responsible corporations ensure that the journey will be crowded and some routes cut off.

With this in mind, we pose two questions to our panelists.

1. What milestones and songlines should guide us on our way to an imagined future profession? How will we know if we have lost our way?
2.     How should we interact with other professions on a similar journey? Like commuters on a train who dare not speak, shipwrecked strangers who must quickly band together, or something else altogether?

Followed by:
Conference close by the AES President, and handover to aes25 Ngambri/Canberra