Toward Indigenous-Led Social Change: International Indigenous Evaluation Theory in Local Programmatic Practice

• In Event: Indigenous Futures: Forging New Educational Possibilities and Leadership for Social Change Through Decolonizing Learning Environments

Abstract

This presentation offers a synthesis of international Indigenous evaluation literature, with a view to describing key opportunities to reimagine evaluative practice in an Indigenous-led social change program located in an Australian university.

Evaluation is a significant tool of colonial governance in Indigenous affairs; often used by governments, deploying largely non-Indigenous concepts of validity and social change, in contexts where funding is sought (and re-sought) to provide services to Indigenous people. In contrast, Indigenous evaluation frameworks provide a programmatic and structural approach in which Indigenous knowledges, nations and sovereignties are centered. The current Indigenous evaluation literature is largely located across Canada, the United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand, with little being found in Australia.

This presentation is grounded in key concepts in the international Indigenous evaluation literature; namely, relationships, relevance, and responsibility (Smith, 2018). These concepts are offered in contrast to the more recent emphasis on ‘impact’, increasingly employed as the language of evaluation. We offer our interpretation of key concepts in international literature for self-determined, relational, and collective change, in an Indigenous leadership education program. We argue that incorporating relational accountabilities as evaluative practice allows the program to re-imagine ‘impact’ through an Indigenous lens, and to reimagine data in relationally generative ways.

We offer a synthesis of the international literature to name values that center Indigenous sovereignty. In doing so, we reorient evaluation theory and practice beyond the requirements of funders and government, towards Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Our contribution could be applicable to theorists and practitioners, posing questions for those within government, and to those who are practicing and navigating evaluation in education and leadership training contexts.

There are two key ideas that we take up from the literature review as relevant for our programmatic practices. First, we outline the context in which evaluation plays a role in governance through policy and the associated imperative to increase evaluators’ cultural competence (Chouinard & Cram, 2019). As one of the two strands of literature associated with Indigenous evaluation, cultural competence is centered on a recognition of how culture and context shape the validity of evaluation practice. In the field of evaluation, ‘culture’ is often not defined and is used as a term to signify a range of concepts, practices, and relationships. Theories of cultural competency make the case for evaluators to move toward higher ‘standards’ of capacity to understand and respond to the particularities of the cultural context in which they work, in a move to improve the validity of evaluation, particularly for multicultural communities (Kirkhart, 2005). While significant, an approach oriented by the concerns of cultural competence does not necessarily engage with Indigenous sovereignties, issues, or aspirations. Considering these limitations of cultural competency approaches for a program premised on Indigenous leadership, we take up the recent values proposed in Indigenous evaluation literature (Hopson & Cram, 2018; Smith, 2018) of the three Rs—relevance, relationships and responsibility—to argue that they both provide a meaningful alternative to impact discourse and offer a way to conceptualize evaluation as a relational enactment.

Authors

• Fiona Belcher, University of Melbourne

• Nikki Moodie, University of Melbourne