Evaluation Matters—He Take Tō Te Aromatawai 4: 2018

Keynote Address for 4th Annual Conference of the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment
29 September, 2017
Chicago, Illinois

The epistemic systems that inform indigenous and Western research methods are based on competing cultural truth claims about reality, including the ways of knowing, the nature of meaning, and the separation or participation of an observer. Ian Barbour’s models of relationship between Western academic cultures with competing truth claims can be applied to the relationship between indigenous and Western research. Each of the four models of relationship—conflict, independence, dialogue, and… Read more

Mount Ruapehu, locally known as Matua Te Mana, is the metaphorical ancestor of Māori living around the rural community of Raetihi. Matua Te Mana has a significant presence and is pivotal to the health and wellbeing of local iwi. Whānau are leading Te Puāwai o Te Ahi Kaa innovation project, based at Te Puke Marae, in partnership with Te Oranganui. The latter is the Whanganui regional Māori health and social services provider. This Ministry of Health-funded, 3-year, Whānau Ora-focused and… Read more

In 2006, the ASB Community Trust (now Foundation North) committed $20 million to raising Māori and Pacific educational achievement in Auckland and Northland. Ten providers were funded through the Māori and Pacific Education Initiative (MPEI) to implement innovative educational approaches in their communities. Evaluators developed an overarching MPEI theory of change and assessed this initial phase of MPEI as highly effective. Foundation North has since committed to Ngā Tau Tuangahuru (“… Read more

Evaluative capacity building is a critical element of weaving the action of evaluation, evaluative activity, evaluative thinking, and appreciation of evaluation into the fabric of organisations. AgResearch, the Crown Research Institute for the New Zealand pastoral farming sector, is embarking on the evaluative capacity building journey following an internal review identifying the need for evaluation to enable better measuring and monitoring of impact from science research programmes.
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Many organisations engage in self-evaluation. This requires organisational capacity to undertake evaluation and then capacity to make use of evaluation findings. Organisations lacking sufficient capacity often engage in evaluation capacity building (ECB). Most ECB literature describes how professional external evaluators build organisational evaluation capacity. In contrast, this study explored how people who are not professional evaluators are building evaluation capacity within their own… Read more

In Aotearoa New Zealand a braided rivers—he awa whiria metaphor is facilitating conversations between Māori (indigenous peoples) and non-Māori researchers about the integration of knowledge systems. This article explores how an approach based on he awa whiria can work in practice in the examination of the efficacy for Māori whānau (families) of the government’s intensive home-visiting programme, Family Start. A retrospective impact evaluation of Family Start for children born from 2004 to… Read more

Value for Money (VfM) poses an evaluative question about how well resources are used, and whether the resource use is justified (King, 2017). In international development there is increasing scrutiny on VfM. Currently, however, VfM assessment in the sector leaves substantial room for improvement. For example, VfM frameworks often comprise a collection of indicators of variable quality, devoid of an explicitly evaluative judgement. This article demonstrates the use of explicit evaluative… Read more

 Review of: Michael Quinn Patton. (2018). Principles-focused evaluation: The GUIDE. New York, NY: Guilford Press. 435 pp. ISBN: 978-1-46-253182-0.