aes23 in Meanjin - Day 1 Reflections

So aes23 has kicked off with a provocative and sparky day. I love these conferences! After being welcomed to Country by Uncle Billy who played some really beautiful notes on the digeridoo, Kiri Parata, the President of the AES warmly opened the conference. The first keynote, Distinguished Professor Emerita Maggie Walter, began noting the 200 years of social policy failure impacting First Peoples here in Australia. She cautioned us that poor evaluation can contribute to this. In particular when evaluation doesn't incorporate First Nations "lifeworlds". She reminded us that evaluation methods are not neutral but influenced by cultural values, assumptions, and meaning making - our "lifeworld". Our failure to recognise the difference between our lifeworld and that of First Peoples can result in significant harm. Maggie shared the practice of Indigenous evaluation methodologies as a solution to ensure evaluations deliver benefits rather than compounding harm.

Following naturally from Maggie’s keynote was a panel on building locally-led monitoring and evaluation with Nyomba (Helen) Gandangu, Marlkirdi Rose Napaljarri, Allan Mua Illingworth , Tony Kiessler and Chris Roche . The term lifeworlds threaded through. Aunty Helen explained how Yolngu people have deep knowledge, wisdom and culture. They have been practicing monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) for thousands of years. She described how they track the development of young people against cultural milestones. She talked about the difficulty of translating Yolgnu ways with Western approaches and said “We paddle slowly in a canoe, you people come in a speed boat and we don’t know where you are leading us”. She said “we see with our lens, you can’t see with your lens. MEL is invisible to us”. One of the ways they have been re-framing MEL is as “tracking and learning”. Allan continued the thread about locally-led MEL in the Pacific. He explained how MEL came to the Pacific through international aid – so it is colonised practice. He said in order to de-couple ourselves from this we need to hold back and allow ourselves to find our own ways of knowing and being. We are starting to see some momentum. One thing to do is to build principles of mutual benefit and reciprocity and kinship. Gifting of knowledge and data only comes from trust.

In the afternoon I had fun with Kate McKegg leading an interactive session on the global poly-crisis and what we as evaluators are going to do about it - lots of sparky ideas came out of that including setting up an evaluation Union to push back on unrealistic job requests from Govt. We also talked about the need to upskill and get ready to help with complex systems change interventions and adaptive practice. In some sort of weird juxtaposition, the next session was about the Australian Evaluation Center and their perceived need for more high-quality impact evaluation with counterfactuals. Big thanks to Phillip Belling for expertly hosting this diverse conversation.