aes19 International Evaluation Conference

Samantha Togni (S2 Consulting), Kate McKegg (Knowledge Institute / Kinnect Group), Nan Wehipeihana (Kinnect Group)

Complex social and environmental issues increasingly challenge us to innovate to promote equity and sustainability. Evaluation in these real-world settings is important to support innovation effectiveness; it is also challenging, as conventional evaluation is not a good fit with innovation and complexity. Developmental evaluation responds to these challenges by integrating evaluation with the innovation, informing development through iterative learning.

DE is agnostic to methods. Rather, it is a relationship-based approach guided by essential principles brought to life in ways and to degrees relevant to the context. In this way it is agile and adaptive to support innovation development and learning in real-time with rigorous evaluation. This is DE's greatest strength; it is 'un-boxed' from the constraints of conventional evaluation design, enabling the evaluation to move with the innovation and embrace emergence and complexity. Simultaneously, this is DE's ultimate challenge: what is DE exactly and how do you do it?

Australian and international Indigenous and non-Indigenous DE evaluator panellists respond to these challenging questions, critically reflecting on our practice. We will explore: how you describe and know you are doing DE when it looks different in different contexts; how you convince commissioners of its value when you cannot know in advance exactly what it will entail and what data will be collected; and how do you define rigour in DE? We will examine DE's relationships-based nature and the assertion that the evaluator is the key 'tool' in this approach, exploring the strengths of the DE principles. We will invite audience sharing of DE definitions and experiences.

Recognition is growing of DE's value in supporting innovation development in complexity. DE is challenging and re-defining what we mean by evaluation. We need to develop our knowledge base on DE practice to better understand how it works and what it takes.