I bet this has happened to you. You are at a dinner party, neighborhood get together, or some other social event, and someone asks you the most dangerous question, “So, what do you do for a living?” If you answer honestly, “I’m an evaluator,” you will spend at least 30  ...

This article is drawn from the personal experience of two evaluators working in a post-disaster context. While the evaluators, also the authors of this article, were both experienced in a range of evaluation settings, they found that little in the evaluation literature prepared for them for working in such a ...

The term developmental evaluation was coined by Michael Quinn Patton in the mid-1990s to describe the role of evaluators in the development of an innovative initiative. Core evaluation skills, such as articulating the initiative’s theory of change, asking evaluative questions, and providing timely information on emerging results, help the initiative ...

Novice evaluators in Aotearoa New Zealand have few resources to assist them with reconciling the complex philosophical, theoretical, and practice tensions inherent in programme evaluation. This article provides guidelines to assist novice evaluators in their journey to become “thoughtful” practitioners balancing methodological credibility with stakeholder empowerment. The approach is informed  ...

Developing evaluation capacity with non-government organisations (NGOs) in New Zealand is in vogue, with funders increasingly keen to demonstrate that their investments in social-service programmes are outcomes-focused and providers keen to demonstrate the difference they are making. This article presents a case study of how a large philanthropic trust, focused ...

Indigenous evaluators, and evaluators who position themselves in the transformative paradigm, share a common interest in positive transformation for those who experience discrimination and oppression. The determination of strategies for exploring how evaluators can contribute to positive transformation is complex territory. In this article we explore the common ground and ...

Cultural fit is a concept that can be applied to the effectiveness of one’s evaluation practice as well as the interventions that seek to help people. We argue that there is substantial vagueness about being culturally competent, or culturally responsive, or both, and that the concepts these terms are attempting to embody can be ...

This article reports the results of a meta-evaluation of 30 publicly accessible evaluation reports written or commissioned by 20 New Zealand public-sector agencies during the period 2010–2013 to understand how evaluative reasoning is being practised in Aotearoa New Zealand. The reports were examined to find evidence of five key elements of evaluative reasoning, namely, evaluative ...

Keynote Presentation
Our House, Our Whare, Our Fale: Building Strong Evaluation in Aotearoa New Zealand
Annual Conference of the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association (ANZEA)
Te Papa, Wellington, 7–10 July 2014