Evaluation Capacity-building: A Tale of Value-adding

Abstract

Evaluation capacity-building entails not only developing the expertise needed to undertake robust and useful evaluations; it also involves creating and sustaining a market for that expertise by promoting an organisational culture in which evaluation is a routine part of ‘the way we do things around here’. A challenge for evaluators is to contribute to evaluation capacity-building while also fulfilling their key responsibilities to undertake evaluations. A key strategy is to focus on both discerning value and adding value for clients/commissioners of evaluations. This paper takes as examples two related internal evaluation projects conducted for the Queensland Police Service that have added value for the client and, in doing so, have helped to promote and sustain an evaluation culture within the organisation. It describes key elements of these evaluations that contributed to evaluation capacity-building. The paper highlights the key role that evaluators themselves, especially internal evaluators, can take in evaluation capacity-building, and proposes that internal evaluators can, and should, integrate evaluation capacity-building into their routine program evaluation work.