what's love got to do with it?

A couple of weeks ago some of the iPEN team got the chance to journey over to Adelaide, Australia to attend the Australian Evaluation Society Conference.

This conference marked a welcome return to some much missed face-to-face engagement with colleagues, and provided a fantastic opportunity to hear (and see) what’s been exercising our aussie counterparts’ minds.

​We were struck at some of the themes we heard being repeated across sessions. This increased resonance on many fronts, as the future pathways work continues and we cogitate what the future state of the science system might look like.

​We noticed many of our colleagues talking about the critical importance of acknowledging and reflecting “place” in evaluation practice. There was also a much more pronounced focus on what good evaluative practice looks like when working with indigenous communities.  And finally, there was an almost unashamed focus on values. While ‘values’ are literally at the heart of the e[VALUE]ation profession, the strength of presentations and workshops around this concept also jumped out at us (including a whole day workshop!)

​So what does this all mean for us?

​These repeating messages about place and values (especially exemplified when considering what good practice looks like when working with indigenous communities) highlighted and reminded us about the importance of acknowledging that the context in which our work happens is huge. It is the main factor that determines what is most important (valued) and for who, and therefore what outcomes and impacts are of greatest interest to “target” when planning any monitoring and evaluation activity.

“What matters and for whom” is a question that is routinely posed and at the core of evaluative practice. This question is all about seeking to understand the context, and consequently the values, of the people, actors, entities, and organisations who have an interest, or role to play, in a given project or programme.

This is equally valid to ask for our science projects and programmes. Impact is a human construct –  by definition it is talking about change. How we judge that – good, bad or otherwise – is completely dependent on the values within that context.

For us, our starting point is MBIE. Their Position Paper on the Impact of Research tells us to look at things like the Living Standards Framework as a starting point. However, this lacks any nuance around how much attention should be given to those big ‘categories’.

Just as we would expect (and require) our schools and hospitals to adapt the education and health care they provide to meet the needs of the local area, this is also needed for our science. While we do “get it” in theory (i.e. not all science can, or should, be commercialised), we don’t often challenge ourselves to do this more systematically. We don’t often ask our ourselves, “what’s going on for our stakeholders, partners, and collaborators? What do they care about? What’s the problem they need solving, and what contribution can we make to addressing this?”

Asking these questions gets to the heart of the matter and that is where the love lies. It’s all about what is cared about (valued) in that particular context, and consequently, the kind of difference (impact) you could make.

The good news!

​Taking time to really engage with the context and values your science is located in doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming. We know from our training that you often have many of the “answers”, its just having the right tools and guidance to be more systematic about it.

We have links to lots of simple but effective tools in our Clarifying, Planning, and Developing modules and you can find lots of others over on the Beyond Results website (thanks AgResearch!) as well as the Integrated Research Toolkit, hosted by Manaaki Whenua.

And, if you really want to give these a go, come along to one of our workshops. To find out when they’re running just drop us a line via the contacts page.