I hope you will appreciate this interesting and pertinent blog post. I was in Beijing in 2003 at the inaugural meeting of IDEAS. Still quite new to evaluation, I was told that the impressive person taking the floor was famous in development evaluation circles. Our subsequent interactions over the years
Do you agree with the following five observations? If so, the time is right for evaluation professionals to align. By 'align' I do not mean coordination or doing away with healthy competition. I refer to sharing some broad goals as evaluation professionals who wish to contribute to the
One thing is certain: the proficiencies and abilities that will help us deal with the world in an era defined by the Anthropocene, the SDGs and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are quite different from those of past decades. There are many similarities between the competency frameworks that the experts in
Skill 6. Deep Generalists In order to be a good evaluation professional, it is essential to see connections. We have to be able to analyse, integrate and synthesise - what we know from past research and evaluation literature, what we derive from different sources and methods used during the evaluation, and
"Are modernity's blueprints for evaluation theory and practice exhausted?" Only now and again one finds provocative questions and insights during an evaluation conference keynote. A keynote that is Innovative. Thought-provoking. Visionary. In 2018, renowned evaluation scholar Thomas Schwandt delivered one of these rare speeches at
I'm Leslie Goodyear, and I have recently finished my year as president of the American Evaluation Association. In my day job, I'm an evaluation practitioner at Education Development Center (EDC) in Waltham, MA. I've been studying and conducting evaluations for over 20 years. But
I head the Independent Evaluation Unit (IEU) of the Green Climate Fund, an office that was founded only two years ago. Since that time the IEU has transitioned from a one-person operation to an organisation with many young, passionate, professionals who take on tasks vital to our work. Many
Zenda's invitation to contribute to her blog with some tips "from the Global South" for Young and Emerging Evaluators has made me reflect on how to help newcomers to the evaluation field avoid common mistakes and break paradigms in this era where transformations are required so
The final session of the 2018 American Evaluation Association meeting was devoted to engaging with youth in evaluation; the wonderful surprise was that the panelists were all youth who had worked as evaluators on projects in which they explored strategies for meaningful engagement. The session was chaired by Katie Richards-
As a restoration ecologist who has come to embrace the power of evaluation to better understand systems change, help develop new approaches to intractable problems, generate ongoing adaptations to changing conditions and provide guidance for rapid response under crisis condition I can see how evaluation can help to transform social
