For years, we have invested in training evaluators, improving methodologies, organising conferences and strengthening institutions. Yet perhaps we have paid far less attention to something both simpler and more difficult: who brings all these efforts together once we return home?
A few days ago, I was talking with a colleague about evaluation. At some point, our conversation turned to the national evaluation association.
“There have been virtually no activities for nine years,” she told me.
I have not systematically examined the history of that particular association, so I take her comment for what it is: an observation, not evidence about the association itself. Still, her words stayed with me, perhaps because they point to a much wider problem.
While the international evaluation community organises increasingly sophisticated conferences, global initiatives, webinars, working groups and professional gatherings, what happens at country level between conferences?
Who keeps evaluators connected? Who brings together those who produce evaluations and those who should be commissioning them? Who connects government, universities, civil society, consultants, emerging evaluators and international organisations? Who sustains a national conversation about quality, ethics, professionalisation and evaluation use?
Perhaps we have devoted considerable attention to developing evaluation capacities, but far too little to developing the collective capacity of evaluation systems themselves.
