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Indigenous Evaluation: An Editorial Review

For the first issue of 2012 we bring you a special edition of EJA that deals with evaluation in indigenous settings. But before we present some new articles in this field, we felt that it would be interesting to review what has been published and discussed on the topic to date (especially in EJA) and to see how the area of indigenous evaluation has evolved in Australasia. This task has involved a search along our shelves, as well as a more formal library search that has resulted in material that goes back more than 30 years. The first references to evaluations amongst indigenous groups appear to have come under the umbrella of the need for cross-cultural awareness (Brislin & Segall 1975; Kumar 1979; Patton 1985). In Australasia, one of the first references we could find concerning working with indigenous groups and of being culturally aware appeared in EJA in 1993. At this time, Westwood and Brous wrote a reflective piece based on the experience of conducting field work that required working with a ‘non-mainstream cultural group’. The article used the authors’ evaluation experiences to provide some lessons for evaluation practice. They determined that such evaluations need to consider: cultural taboos; sensitive issues; language; functional differences and lifestyle; but noted particularly that ‘whilst this seems logical, in practice it can be difficult to apply’ (Westwood & Brouse 1993, p. 43). In a similar vein, and still about cross-cultural awareness, Patricia Rogers (1995) writes about Ernie House’s (1992) article, published in the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation where, in a discussion about stakeholder approaches to evaluation, he suggested that evaluators need to consider minority groups carefully. Ernie pointed out the difficulty of integrating the divergent (and often conflicting views) of different subgroups within minorities and that by outsiders treating all those within a minority group as ‘the same’ can lead to domination of decision-making by the most powerful subgroups—and therefore to a dissolution of any democratic process. Such writing of the time gives the impression, though, that many (Western) evaluators remained somewhat aloof from the indigenous people receiving programs (e.g. Adhikari & Yik 1999). Indeed, Neale and Tavila (2007) continue to be concerned about this and so raise the issue of who carries out, or benefits from, an evaluation because ‘indigenous communities have a long history of being seen as the “other” where they are researched “on” and their experience interpreted by outsiders through a different lens’ (Smith 1999). This was certainly the case for three of the articles written as a section of EJA in 1997 (‘Indigenous perspectives’, EJA, vol. 9, nos. 1&2, pp. 24–61). For instance, projects undertaken in Australasia at that time did not mention the possibility of recipients becoming full-blown evaluators. This was even the case when evaluations were undertaken by (the then) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). As a manager in the Office of Evaluation and Audit in ATSIC described: