Graduate Students & New Evaluators TIG Week: Integrating Decolonizing and Equity-Focused Evaluation Approaches by Portia Ofosu-Addo

Date: Wednesday, August 6, 2025

This week, the members of the Graduate Students and New Evaluators (GSNE) TIG share various tips, tricks, resources, and points of view that can be helpful for students and new evaluators. We hope both evaluators, new and old, will review this material and share the resources and stories with each other.

-Liz Rojas (GSNE, Co-Chair), Christine Liboon (GSNE, Program Chair), and GSNE Leadership Team

Minji, whose PhD dissertation focused on decolonizing evaluation (DCE), and I, currently researching the practical realities of equity-focused evaluation, came together through our shared passion for transforming evaluation practice through these two approaches. The Glocal Evaluation Week (EFE) provided the perfect opportunity to bring this research idea to fruition. For our research, we explored two questions: How do decolonizing evaluation principles intersect with equity-focused evaluation? And what opportunities exist to integrate them for greater impact?

We conducted a concept mapping study to explore connections between DCE principles and EFE approaches. Using a deductive coding approach guided by DCE principles, we analyzed three foundational documents on EFE. Working independently, we coded the texts using Atlas.ti, and reconciled differences through iterative discussions. This process helped us identify key patterns, areas of overlaps, and gaps between the two approaches.

 Lessons Learned

1. Strong Alignment on Responsiveness and Environmental Factors – Both the DCE and EFE emphasize the importance of centering community voices and needs through actively listening and meaningfully involving communities and marginalized groups throughout the evaluation process. Recognizing environmental factors – which represent the roles and capacity of evaluators, funders, program staff, governments, as well as time, budget, program design, and other real-world influences on evaluation – also emerged as a key shared value in both approaches. Essentially, evaluations cannot be truly responsive if these environmental factors are not intentionally considered and managed during the evaluation.
2. Mindset Shift is Essential – DCE challenges dominant ways of knowing and calls for a paradigm shift in how we define knowledge, value, and evidence. This process of deconstruction requires reflexivity, which challenges evaluator mindsets, biases, and positionality.Mindset deconstruction is critical to transforming evaluation practice and should be more emphasized in the EFE approach. Practitioners can strengthen their use of EFE by intentionally embedding these principles into their work.
3. Participation ? Power – Superficial involvement is not enough! True equity requires co-creation and knowledge sharing that empowers communities and enhances self-determination. The EFE literature did not explicitly emphasize considering the community/marginalized groups as context experts throughout the evaluation. Therefore, there’s an opportunity for more intentional strategies to build self-determination among communities, giving them agency and power from evaluation design to implementation and dissemination.

Hot Tips

Present Principles and Values Before the Approach. It can be challenging for evaluators (especially external evaluators) to introduce decolonizing and equity-focused evaluation approaches to program leaders who may be unfamiliar with these concepts. For greater buy-in, start by communicating the values and principles, such as self-determination, co-creation, responsiveness and capacity building, that guide these approaches. 

Why? Principles may resonate more universally, and leaders are more likely to embrace these principles than the terminology of specific approaches. 

By focusing on shared values first, you can help leaders connect with the Why before the How. Once they recognize its alignment with their organizational goals and values, they will be more open to adopting the approaches that operationalize these principles. 

Rad Resources

• Decolonizing Science: Undoing the Colonial and Racist Hegemony of Western Science
• Lessons on Decolonizing Evaluation from Kaupapa M?ori Evaluation
• How to Design and Manage Equity-focused Evaluations
• Shifting the Evaluation Paradigm: The Equitable Evaluation Framework 

Reach out to learn more:(portia.ofosu-addo@cgu.edu).

AEA is hosting GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.