The European Evaluation Society (EES) Conference brings the evaluation community together to explore this year’s theme, ‘Evaluation for Vibrant Democracies’.
Itad is contributing to a range of sessions exploring how evaluation can respond to some of the challenges facing our sector and wider society. Drawing on our work and collaborations, we’ll share practical experience and approaches, and join discussions on how evaluation can become more responsive, inclusive and useful.
Explore our sessions below and find out where you can join the conversation.
Commissioning evaluations in ways that support democracy
28 October, 15.00-16.30, Auditorium Grand Theatre
How evaluations are commissioned can have a profound influence on whose perspectives are heard, the questions that get asked, and ultimately how useful and responsive an evaluation can be.
Itad will at an interactive discussion exploring democratic commissioning: looking beyond contracting and procurement to consider commissioning as a substantive part of the evaluation process.
The session builds on The Power of Commissioning: Enabling Democratic Evaluation, edited by Nicoletta Stame and María Bustelo, to which Itad’s Rob Lloyd contributed a chapter. Drawing on insights from the book and the experiences of commissioners and evaluators, the discussion will explore how choices made throughout commissioning, from framing the problem and developing Terms of Reference to selecting teams, managing evaluations and supporting their use, can strengthen stakeholder engagement, transparency and participation.
Participants will share practical challenges and strategies for creating greater space for responsiveness and democratic principles within real institutional and organisational settings. The session will also consider how these questions play out across different geographical contexts, including in relation to decolonising evaluation.
Evaluation As Sense-Making In Complex Systems Under Uncertainty: Learning, orientation and adaptive action when change is non-linear
29 October, 13.00-14.30, The Studio
Complex systems rarely unfold as planned. Change is non-linear, evidence can be incomplete or contested, and different people may interpret the same developments in very different ways. In these contexts, evaluation needs to do more than assess progress against pre-set expectations. It can help people make sense of what is changing, why it may be happening and how to respond.
This interactive session explores evaluation as a shared sensemaking practice, looking at how different approaches can support evaluation from individual projects through to wider systems change. Three contributors, will share examples of how they use sensemaking in different contexts, including approaches that draw on participation, dialogue and multiple forms of evidence to understand emerging and unintended effects.
Participants will also have the opportunity to reflect on their own sensemaking practices and experiences, helping to surface useful approaches and resources from across the group.
Fragility-Aware Practice in Liquid Times: A professional reckoning for evaluation and learning
29 October, 13.00-14.30, Room 3.4
We are working in increasingly unstable conditions, where priorities can shift overnight, programmes change or disappear mid-evaluation, leadership moves on and funding cuts can erode relationships and institutional knowledge. Yet many of the frameworks underpinning evaluation assume a level of stability that may no longer exist, if it ever did.
This interactive session introduces fragility-aware evaluative practice, an approach that recognises instability not as an exception, but as part of the environment in which evaluation takes place. It asks what needs to change in our assumptions, timescales, relationships and definitions of rigour when the ground is constantly shifting.
Importantly, the session also challenges whose experience of fragility the evaluation profession recognises. For many practitioners, communities and organisations, particularly in the Global South and marginalised contexts, institutional stability has never been a given.
Through a fishbowl discussion, participants will share experiences of evaluating on unstable ground, explore the professional and commissioning norms that help or hinder fragility-aware practice, and identify practical shifts that could enable evaluation and learning to remain relevant in uncertain times.
Keeping control: practical workflows for using generative AI in evaluation
26-30 October, Poster zone
Generative AI has the potential to help evaluators work with evidence at a scale and speed that would previously have been difficult. But where does it genuinely add value, and how do we use it without compromising quality, transparency and evaluator judgement?
Itad’s Chris Perry will share practical lessons from applying generative AI in real-world evaluation work. Drawing on our experience across evidence reviews, portfolio analysis, qualitative coding and synthesis, we’ll explore how human-led AI workflows can help evaluators classify, extract, code and synthesise large volumes of evidence while keeping people firmly in control. We’ll also share what we’re learning about the conditions that make these approaches work, from clearly defined tasks and robust verification to traceability and secure handling of data.
