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Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies: The Role of Evaluation
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- May 1, 2018
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Deskripsi
Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies is a call to action, focusing on the role that evaluators can play in addressing social and economic problems. Evaluation extends beyond theories and methods, encompassing a range of proven approaches for addressing ecological complexities that drive inequities around the globe.
Bringing together leading thinkers and problem-solvers, this collection traverses the range of contexts at the frontiers of the field—from inadequate food supply and housing to unemployment and poverty. Editors Rodney Hopson and Fiona Cram demonstrate the effects of an engaged approach to evaluation, in which three considerations take center stage: its relevance, the relationships it engenders, and the responsibilities it requires. This is a handbook for tackling the social and economic problems of the twenty-first century which, though wicked, are amenable to the tools of the trade.
Tindakan Buku
Mulai MembacaInformasi Buku
Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies: The Role of Evaluation
Panjangnya: 434 halaman5 jam
Deskripsi
Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies is a call to action, focusing on the role that evaluators can play in addressing social and economic problems. Evaluation extends beyond theories and methods, encompassing a range of proven approaches for addressing ecological complexities that drive inequities around the globe.
Bringing together leading thinkers and problem-solvers, this collection traverses the range of contexts at the frontiers of the field—from inadequate food supply and housing to unemployment and poverty. Editors Rodney Hopson and Fiona Cram demonstrate the effects of an engaged approach to evaluation, in which three considerations take center stage: its relevance, the relationships it engenders, and the responsibilities it requires. This is a handbook for tackling the social and economic problems of the twenty-first century which, though wicked, are amenable to the tools of the trade.
- Penerbit:
- Stanford Business Books
- Dirilis:
- May 1, 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503605565
- Format:
- Buku
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Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hopson, Rodney K. (Rodney Kofi), editor. | Cram, Fiona, editor.
Title: Tackling wicked problems in complex ecologies : the role of evaluation / edited by Rodney Hopson and Fiona Cram.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Business Books, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050475 (print) | LCCN 2017053067 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503605565 (electronic) | ISBN 9781503600713 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Social problems. | Evaluation research (Social action programs) | Social service—Evaluation.
Classification: LCC HN18.3 (ebook) | LCC HN18.3 .T33 2018 (print) | DDC 306—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050475
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Illustration: Shutterstock/Andrew Krasovitckii
TACKLING WICKED PROBLEMS IN COMPLEX ECOLOGIES
The Role of Evaluation
Edited by RODNEY HOPSON and FIONA CRAM
STANFORD BUSINESS BOOKS
AN IMPRINT OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
My thanks to DQW and Tk for the provision of a home base that tethers me and enables me to venture out into the world. He mihi mahana ki a korua, he mihi aroha hoki.
—Fiona
My love to DebMEHop, kids (Ayana, Hannibal, Aliyah, Habiba, Ayia). This book was conceived and completed during some of the most trying times in our lives, weathering death and divorce. May this book inspire us to tackle these wicked problems with fortitude, hope, and a renewing of lives, passions, and dreams. This book is yours.
—Rodney
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame
Contents
Acknowledgments
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
1. Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Evaluation Ecologies
Rodney Hopson and Fiona Cram
2. Ecological Thinking as a Route to Sustainability in Evaluation
Andy Rowe
3. Indigenous Insight on Valuing Complexity, Sustaining Relationships, Being Accountable
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
PART II: VULNERABILITIES IN DIVERSE EVALUATION ECOLOGIES
4. Evaluating HIV Practices and Evidence-Supported Programs in AIDS Community-Based Organizations
Robin Lin Miller
5. Complex Ecology in International Development Evaluation, Focusing on Women and People with Disabilities
Donna M. Mertens and Arlinda S. Boland
6. Creating Collaborative Community Practices through Restorative Justice Principles in Evaluation
Jill Anne Chouinard and Ayesha S. Boyce
PART III: SYSTEM AND POLICY RESPONSIVENESS TO COMPLEX EVALUATION ECOLOGIES
7. Creating a Sustainable and Equitable Food System
Oran B. Hesterman and Ricardo Millett
8. Developing Relevant and Responsible Recommendations in Health Policy
Crystal L. Barksdale, Rodney Hopson, Kimberly Green, Karolina Schantz, Jennifer Kenyon, William Rodick, Akashi Kaul, and C. Godfrey Jacobs
PART IV: TOWARD SOLUTIONS
9. Considering the Paris Declaration Principles on Aid Effectiveness as a Means to Drive Reform
Michael Quinn Patton
10. Digging Deeper to Engage Wicked Problems through Evaluation
Fiona Cram and Rodney Hopson
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
IT HAS BEEN AN AMAZING JOURNEY getting to this point. The seed emerged in 2011 when Rodney was President-elect of the American Evaluation Association. In the year prior, we—Rodney, Fiona, and Ricardo Millet—invited AEA members to a conversation about evaluation in complex ecologies. Some of these early conversations laid the foundation both for the association’s 2012 focal theme and this book.
From there, thanks to colleagues at the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, the Eastern Evaluation Research Society, and the Canadian Evaluation Society, who hosted earlier versions of Rodney’s presidential address, the conversations continued in Kalamazoo, MI; Absecon, NJ; and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Out of these conversations grew the 3Rs of relationships, relevance, and responsibilities.
A small task force of colleagues in 2012 as an AEA Board Task Force put life into the development of this theme. We especially thank this task force group for helping to water and nurture the seed so that it could germinate. They include Ricardo Millet, Chris Metzner, Matt Keene, Nicky Bowman, Jenica Huddleston, Steve Maack, Brandi Gilbert, Bob Williams, and Valerie Williams.
Through additional conversations and presentations over the course of 2012, culminating with AEA’s annual meeting, the fast-growing seedling grew into a sapling. Other colleagues reviewed multiple versions of the sapling concept and honed it with their touch of sunlight and care at various stages of the idea development; they included Katrina Bledsoe, Jackie Copeland-Carson, David Fetterman, Jennifer Greene, Ted Hamann, Stafford Hood, Karen Kirkhart, Kien Lee, Jim Schreiber, and Tom Schwandt.
When we thought about what a book might look like we turned to Margo Fleming at Stanford University Press for wise counsel. Her regular meetings with us and follow-ups, encouraging comments, and helpful hints were priceless. She has been steadfast in her support of this project and has encouraged us to be both focused and disciplined throughout. We are confident in saying that this book would not have happened without her.
And it would have been content free if it weren’t for the authors—our friends and colleagues who joined with us and who produced exciting written work that reflects their hearts and their intellects. In this way the sapling grew into a tree. The anonymous reviewers then enabled us to stand back and consider how best to present our passion about evaluation in complex ecologies.
Part I
Foundations
1
Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Evaluation Ecologies
RODNEY HOPSON and FIONA CRAM
Technologies live in complex ecologies.
The meaning of any one depends on what others are available.
Turkle, 2011: 188
Complexity
is taken to mean complicated when actually it means that simple interactions among different agents can produce emergent order.
Agar, 2004a: 412
RECENT GLOBAL, NATIONAL, AND LOCAL SHIFTS suggest our world is growing more intolerant, bitter, and divisive as multiple sectors and stakeholders scramble for identity, purpose, and control. With the rise of global terrorism and discrimination, the massive effects of climate change, and epidemic proportions of poverty and greed around the world, questions are being raised about the recognition of and support for peoples who are already underserved and underrepresented. For some peoples this is new, but for many it is just a continuation of decades, if not centuries, of entrapment in ostracized spaces and places. Vulnerable peoples can be found in every society, no matter what religions dominate, in developing and developed countries, in the global north and the global south, and under every political regime. Indigenous peoples, women and girls, LGBTI+ peoples, dissident peoples, to name but a few, have been pushed to the margins of their home places because they are not quite the right fit
and are somehow less acceptable or desirable. If this marginalization spans generations, it is likely that people will have internalized the trauma of wars or enslavement that first led to their marginalization. It is also likely that many will have internalized a belief that their current place is the natural order of things, believing the mythology of their deficits.
Wars and dictatorships have also forced people to leave their homes to travel to presumed safer, kinder places. However, the bodies of children washing up on beaches signals the danger of these attempts, along with the grief and loss of parents who cannot ensure a future for their offspring. If these displaced people survive their journeys across water they may find themselves in a no-man’s-land,
interned in makeshift refugee camps waiting, waiting, waiting for an invitation to move forward. For some, self-immolation is the only form of protest they have left amid the anger, sadness, and hopelessness that descend on them as months in limbo turn into years. Even staying in a home place can be difficult as drought and famines bring hunger, malnutrition, and death.
Those who live in first world comfort have become somewhat inured to the images on their television screens of the despair of others in far-flung places. Even so, their home place is no guarantee of well-being. In their own backyard, early preventable death (for example, by heart disease, by suicide) is a symptom of their home place’s tolerance for inequity, racism (and other isms
), anxiety, isolation, and loneliness. Humanity and our social relations are in crisis.
And amid humanity’s crisis, the natural environment is steadily being degraded and lost because nation-states are driven by imperatives other than sustainability (for example, profit, development). Sometimes these pressures are from without, as superpower countries manipulate political climates and corrupt leaders to ensure that minerals and oils are mined and exported. These same superpowers are known to force local farmers off their traditional lands as they buy up great swaths of food-producing land to ensure freedom from hunger for their own people. Even if a country is committed to environmental protection and sustainability, global water and air currents can undermine these efforts as pollutants produced by other nations have an impact on their home place. Our natural environment is as much in crisis as our humanity, and the butterfly effect of globalization is real: intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa
(Arnove et al. 2013: 1).
This introductory chapter has three goals. First, the chapter will expand on the definition of wicked problems in complex ecologies of evaluation. Second, this chapter will situate responsibilities, relationships, and relevance as core evaluation themes central to the study and practice of evaluation, building off both knowns and unknowns in our field. Finally, the chapter provides a forecast of the chapters in the book, including setting the context for each chapter and contributor. As such, each chapter will be grounded in real case examples that illustrate how evaluators in complex ecologies of practice, policy, and praxis address wicked problems and reflect on the core themes of the book.
Wicked Problems
Over four decades ago, Rittel and Webber (1973) contrasted wicked
problems with tame problems, indicating that the former are less easily defined and cannot be treated, as tame problems can, using linear analytics. Rather, wicked problems are socially complex, multicausal, and highly resistant to resolution. Although they were referring to social planning problems, the term wicked problem has since been applied in many contexts where indigenous and other minoritized groups experience injustice and inequities. Wicked problems drive housing segregation, racial and gendered stereotypes and discrimination, disintegration of schools, rising crime rates, and decreased access to healthy food and its related health benefits, to name just a few consequences. They are inherent in the alarming trends of wealth being concentrated among increasingly fewer and fewer people across the world. The wicked problems of humanity also affect the natural system and have deleterious consequences for the fabric of our global welfare. As Thompson Klein (2004: 517) describes, these problems are emergent phenomena with non-linear dynamics, uncertainties, and high political stakes in decision making.
The call for action that wicked problems
might have once prompted has faded somewhat, though there are increasing signs that these wicked problem notions are reappearing (Kolko 2012; Wilber and Watkins 2015; Williams and van’t Hof 2016). In this volume, Mertens and Boland (Chapter 5) introduce us to super wicked problems.
These issues are characterized by four key features that stress the urgency of evidence-informed understandings of these problems and evidence-informed solutions; namely, Time is running out; those who cause the problem also seek to provide a solution; the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent; and, partly as a result, policy responses discount the future irrationally
(Levin et al. 2012: 123). Jahn (2008: 3) writes that responding in an informed way to these problems will be possible only if society’s capacity for taking action is . . . increased in a sustainable manner and its knowledge base is deepened and broadened.
Rather than be silent and reactionary to the set of shifts and dynamics that reverberate in multiple sectors—education, health, social service, and others—evaluators have a role to play in these times, redefining and representing key principles, ideas, and evidence to inform solutions across a plethora of globally connected arenas. What should the responsibilities of evaluators be? How will evaluators forge relationships with key stakeholders amid this changing sociopolitical milieu? And, what is the relevance of evaluation now and in preparation for the decades ahead?
What Role Do Evaluators Play in Complex Ecologies?
When complex ecologies
was introduced as a conference theme at the 2012 American Evaluation Association (AEA) conference, several evaluators wondered about the choice of the word ecologies in the conference title. They questioned whether systems or context would be more appropriate terms within the current field of practice. We argued then that ecology offers a broader and deeper lens to capture the nuance, meaning, connectivity, consequences, and potential future implications of wicked problems. And although our colleagues’ terms were not far off, their understanding of ecology in evaluation was less considered, and they were a little resistant to its introduction. None of our colleagues, however, questioned the notion of complexity, even though evaluation has been a late adopter of the term (Bamberger et al. 2016; Byrne 2013; Forss et al. 2011; Nwake, 2013; Rogers 2008; Wolf-Branigin 2013).
We argue that our adoption and championing of the term ecology offers a broader and deeper lens for informing evaluative thinking and analysis about intervening in the complex problems facing our world. Although the concept of ecology is not new in evaluation, its use in this book expands the concept beyond a strict environmental focus to encompass the multilayered complexities that define our current existence. Thus, opening evaluation to ecologies encourages and facilitates a discussion throughout the book of wicked problems, of inequity and inequality and their impacts on change initiatives, and of our roles as complexity, contextually, and culturally responsive evaluators of these initiatives.
Evaluation in complex ecologies spans government, nongovernment, philanthropic, tribal, and community settings. It is essential within sectors that address wicked
and superwicked
problems. Evaluation has the potential to add immense value to unpackaging, understanding, and responding to such problems where and when we confront them around the world. However, as a key component of accountability, evidence-based work, and intervention strategies, we evaluators have all too often focused narrowly on methods, tools, and theories. This approach has prevented evaluation from being at the table to inform solutions to real-world problems. Now, more than ever, there are community-level, tribal, national, and international stages for evaluators to contribute to understanding the complex ecologies of inequality and inequity before it is too late. Complex ecologies demand that evaluators be concerned with relationships, attend to responsibilities, and focus on the relevance of their work (see the following discussion).
Ecology, like complexity, is not a concept that evaluators tend to use. Ecology represents the diverse natural, physical, and organizational realities and settings of projects, programs, and policies. The physical aspect of an ecology recognizes our built environment and opens an ecology to a critique based on principles of universal design; that is, whether physical spaces (for example, accommodation, business places) are accessible and usable by all peoples regardless of their age, ability, disability, or size (Human Rights Commission 2010; UniversalDesign.com 2016). From an evaluation perspective, there is an additional inquiry about whether, and how, physical spaces facilitate and support initiative success. Within health this form of inquiry dates to Hippocrates in 400 BCE, with a recent review finding that the built environment of health care providers can contribute to patient safety (Huisman et al. 2012).
The organizational
aspect of an ecology is akin to the human or social system or interactions between and among people. This aspect includes political, patriarchal, and other hierarchies that at a company, community, or country level work to contain and constrain people within what is (often inaccurately) considered to be their proper place.
Capra (1997: 6) writes that it is necessary to see patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and racism [as] examples of social domination that are exploitative and antiecological.
When social systems are studied the role of the natural system is often minimized or viewed as a constant (Liu, Dietz, et al. 2007). The natural realities of ecology are captured for instance in indigenous perspectives that recognize the interconnected nature of humanity with the natural world. Hawaiian Hannah Kihalani Springer (1997, in Meyer 2008: 219) says, I am shaped by my geography.
Manulani Meyer (2008: 216) adds, Land is more than a physical place. It is an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes knowing.
Similarly, Cajete (2000) writes about Indigenous communities living a symbiotic
life in which the natural world is a cocreator of that life and its accompanying symbolic
culture. These interdependencies, among people and between people and the natural environment, ensure well-being and survival.
Evaluators are encouraged to lift their heads up from decisions about method to look about and think about place and space, to contemplate the land on which they stand and the cultural contexts in which they work. Meyer (2008: 224) writes, Our senses are culturally shaped.
They are therefore influenced by what we have each uniquely experienced by growing up and being in place, in an ecology. Meyer (2008: 217) calls this our sensual history
and describes the land as an epistemological cornerstone
:
Indigenous people are all about place. Land/aina, defined as that which feeds,
is the everything of our sense of love, joy and nourishment. Land is our mother. This is not a metaphor . . . Consideration of our place, our mother, is the point here. And she is more than beautiful, or not. She is your mother. (Meyer 2008: 216; original emphases)
Other disciples have embraced ecological thinking for some years. In this volume, we highlight more deliberately how the ecological paradigm has manifested. A key figure in Robin Lin Miller’s (Chapter 4) disciplinary background of community psychology, James G. Kelly, and his colleagues write, The essence of the ecological perspective is to construct an understanding of interrelationships of social structures and social processes of the groups, organizations, and communities in which we live and work
(Kelly et al. 2000: 133). Kelly (2006) has also written autobiographically about the influence of place on his own identity: My identity was bounded by terrain as well as experience.
His expression of identity here resonates with that of Meyer earlier. Invoking ecologies therefore extends to and recognizes the tangible and intangible resources and materials available (or not) in settings where evaluators do their work. A key thread of this book suggests adapting an ecological framing to enhance evaluation methods, approaches, analysis, and meaning making.
Ecologies are complex because wicked problems contribute to the marginalization of peoples based on their race/ethnicity/color, sex/sexuality/gender, age, religion, or other points and intersections of difference from a cisgender, white, male, able-bodied norm. In this context, Wickedness isn’t a degree of difficulty . . . A wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer
(Camillus 2008: 100). Wicked problems are intensely political because ameliorating a wicked problem is often about the redistribution of goods and services to those who may be less deserving
in the common sense of their wider society. Or a solution may mean putting the needs of social systems aside so that the problems of the natural system can be prioritized and fully attended to.
Our rationale for this volume is that, by deferring to the complex ecologies in which we work, we capture more insight into vulnerability and marginalization, as well as into power and privilege. The views of those who can speak out loud are heard, as well as the voices and stories of those who are frequently silenced. We can come to grips with hierarchies, patriarchies, capitalism, and other isms
that oppress, harm, and kill people and the environment (Bookchin 1982). This meaning making about a complex ecology can then inform our evaluative thinking, our analysis of complex solutions to wicked problems, and our ability to represent all players within that ecology. This complex ecology perspective additionally offers expanding disciplinary interest in evaluation in ways that strengthen understanding of evaluation in less discussed and frequented topical areas and sectors. This is essential, as segmented, disciplinary-bound thinking and problem solving is limited in its ability to tackle the problems of society (Thompson Klein 2004). Jahn (2008), for example, maintains that his call for broader, deeper knowledge (see earlier discussion) will only happen through the orderly transcendence of disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, we should not be naïve to the fact that evaluation in complex ecologies requires good resourcing.
The 3Rs: Relationships, Responsibilities, and Relevance
Evaluation in complex ecologies needs to attend to the 3Rs: relationships, responsibilities, and relevance. Critical to increasing our usefulness in complex ecologies are the relationships that enhance our ability to connect with and transform communities, the responsibilities we have to ensure that our work meets the diverse and dynamic needs of stakeholders and other interested groups, and a more grounded, functional, and integrated understanding of the relevance of our work. When we gain this understanding as a profession, evaluation can and does inform policy, strategy, programs, and projects.
The theme of relationships involves the call for evaluators to identify the key interests, interactions, variables, and stakeholders amid dynamic and complex issues at program, policy, and project levels. Kushner’s (2000) personalizing evaluation
stance has all to do with relationships when he writes:
I want to look more closely at what educational programs represent and how we, as evaluators, relate to them. To do so, I will come at the issues from a rather oblique angle—through a consideration of mortality. This is not merely an artifice, a playful disguise, as it were, for a more serious argument. It is, rather, based on a view that our sense of morality and our fears of it are an understated but significant theme in our continuing struggle to construct a democratic society. (26)
Evaluation is personal. We ponder ways in which speech, acts, behaviors, interactions take place and with whom, controlled by and affected by other variables, power relations, and contexts. Evaluators who practice in complex ecologies value the relationships they build or strengthen in the process of evaluating. As Kushner (and we authors of the book) recognizes, how we understand programs, policies, and innovations through individuals and groups and communities of individuals is the crux of the evaluation matter.
Questions that drive the relationships dimension include:
• What key interactions, variables, or stakeholders do we need to attend to (or not)?
• Whose interests and what decisions and relationships drive the context of the work?
• How can we attend to important interactions amid competing interests and values through innovative methodologies, procedures, and processes?
The theme of responsibilities is about propriety. At a glance, it involves evaluators recognizing the complex and complicated nature of the third aspect of the Joint Committee on Standards of Educational Evaluation. The authors write that propriety refers to what is proper, fair, right, and just
in evaluation (Yarbrough et al. 2001: 106). The sum of those standards, however, portrays a more delicate evaluation, especially when it means developing agreements, acknowledging and addressing conflicts, and understanding rights and responsibilities among all in the evaluation process. Evaluators who work with wicked problems in complex ecologies must attend deliberately and intentionally to appropriate standards and guidelines that promote best practices and principles. It means being technically and ethically sound in the process, calling truth to power in ways uncomfortable and dissenting. Questions that drive the responsibilities dimension include:
• What responsibilities, inclusive of and beyond the technical, do we evaluators have in carrying out our evaluations?
• In what ways might evaluation design, implementation, and utilization be responsible to issues pertinent to our general and social welfare?
• How can evaluators ensure our work is responsive, responsible, ethical, equitable, and/or transparent for stakeholders and key users of evaluations?
The theme of relevance has to do with being accurate and meaningful. Although notions of accuracy imply precision, they do not necessarily imply meaningfulness or transparency. Understanding relevance extends more than through assignment of p or t values but implies understanding the cultural. Relevance drives the evaluators’ intent to be culturally, contextually, and technically precise, accurate, and meaningful in measures, questions, indicators, and variables. Questions that drive the relevance dimension include:
• What relevance do our evaluations have in complex social, environmental, fiscal, institutional, and/or programmatic ecologies?
• How can evaluators ensure that their decisions, findings, and insights are meaningful to diverse communities, contexts, and cultures?
• What strategies exist for evaluators, considering our transdisciplinary backgrounds, to convey relevant evaluation processes, practices, and procedures?
What Is Known about Evaluation in Complex Ecologies
When most evaluators think of complexity, before the most recent splurge of texts and articles focused on evaluation and complexity, Michael Patton’s (2011) book and work in developmental evaluation pointed us in the right direction. The developmental evaluation approach is not business as usual in traditional and conventional evaluations with formative and summative expectations. Patton describes a developmental approach to evaluation more suited for change, turbulence, and adaptation at program levels rather than conventional approaches to the field that identify clear, specific, and measureable outcomes at the outset of the evaluation.
To address what might be most appropriately framed within an ecological context,
Patton discusses what might be more than evaluation of methodological approaches. Much too often our evaluation colleagues invest a great deal of time and energy selecting and justifying the appropriateness of one or the other evaluation method for addressing particular (often very complex) problems without having invested sufficient time and effort in considering the ecology of the place,
context, and drivers of presenting problems.
We interpret Patton’s concern regarding this often unexamined application of evaluation methods as the tendency to give short shrift to context and place in problem definition, framing, and understanding. Arguing for his developmental evaluation approach, Patton suggests that the approach is both appropriate for complex situations and, in contrast to traditional program evaluation tendencies, offers different ways of understanding the purpose and situation in which the evaluation occurs; the focus and target of evaluation, modeling, and methods; evaluator roles and relationships; evaluation results and impact; approaches to complexity; and professional qualities (see Exhibit 1.2 in Patton 2011, 23).
This volume, without taking a specifically developmental approach (or any approach, for that matter) to the topic of complex ecologies in evaluation, incorporates how evaluators with complex, contextual, and culturally responsive lenses take multiple evaluation approaches to help solve problems and challenges in diverse ecological contexts of inequity and inequality. In these ways, this volume advances Patton’s notions of complexity without presuming that a developmental evaluation approach is the only way to understand and address recurring issues of inequality and inequity.
Quite typically, what evaluators do when confronted with complexity is to find linear graphic conceptual models (logic models, theories of action or change, or some variation thereof) to depict or describe links between what programs assume their activities are accomplishing and what happens at each step of the way (Weiss 2000). Our way of revealing underlying assumptions is a tried-and-true craft of developing program theory (Rogers et al. 2000). Although our attention to graphic conceptual models has broad applicability across program design, implementation, and evaluation cycles and proves them useful in multiple evaluation approaches for acting as guiding framework and serving as a point of synergy across stakeholders, these same graphic conceptual models tend to oversimplify complex evaluation settings, rarely capture generative or adaptive program events, and/or deemphasize possibilities for multiple pathways (Lawrenz and Huffman 2006).
This volume recognizes seminal contributions from an interdisciplinary and international collection of thought on complex ecologies, such as those who use graphic conceptual models effectively (Funnell and Rogers 2011), realist principles (Pawson 2013), systems concepts and thinking (Williams and Hummelbrunner 2010). Systems thinking, for instance, has proven useful to unpacking social and economic problems that drive the vexing issues of inequalities,
and inefficiencies that our profession strive to address (Williams and van’t Hof 2016). Indeed, considerable attention has been given in our practice literature to system thinking,
along with the importance of interdisciplinary
and context,
as important factors in calibrating effective methodological evaluation approaches to addressing complex problems (Rog et al. 2012; Thomas 2004). However, we argue that a more comprehensive and granular lens for discerning and addressing complexity
is required; specifically, one that incorporates both systems and context considerations in ways that inform and encourage more cooperative ways to understand and
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