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Abstract

Building collective capacity can improve the quality of evaluators’ work, as well as their quality of life. Strengthening collective capacity will help evaluation to influence the policy and program worlds, which continue to misunderstand, misuse, and sometimes fear evaluation. Building this capacity means strengthening the relationships among evaluators themselves, for mutual support, information, collaboration, and sharing. Some barriers to strengthening these relationships include a tendency to operate in a lonely and independent context; an implicit denigration of skills for dealing with people and organizations; and the absence of a forum for discussing these issues. Evaluators can improve their collective capacity in at least three ways: 1) improved membership services from evaluation associations to reduce the vulnerability of individual evaluators to negative reactions to their work; 2) educating evaluation clients more broadly and proactively about what is required for a high quality and useful evaluation; and 3) mechanisms to support and strengthen the evaluation community. For AEA, the local affiliates are key to these improvements.

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Presidential Address: Building Evaluation’s Collective Capacity

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