Authors: Nicholas Hill Place Australia, Eve Millar, Place Australia The use of place-based initiatives (PBIs) to address complex and entrenched disadvantage is expanding across Australia. These initiatives typically go beyond the delivery of single programs and involve cross-sector partnerships that place communities at the centre of efforts to address local problems. While a growing number of initiatives are demonstrating impact, the diversity of approaches, frameworks, and indicators used contributes to a fragmented evidence base. Inconsistencies in how impact is conceptualised and reported limit opportunities for shared learning and present a barrier to the growth and sustainability of the place-based ecosystem.
PLACE Australia is working collaboratively with stakeholders across the ecosystem—including government, philanthropy, not-for-profits, and community organisations—to develop a shared impact framework with a set of flexible indicators that more consistently demonstrate the impact of PBIs, support ongoing learning, and strengthen the sector. As the framework moves from development to implementation, a number of practical challenges arise. These include how shared indicators can be applied flexibly across diverse initiatives, how to balance consistency with local adaptation, how frameworks can support learning rather than compliance, and how Indigenous knowledge and community voice can be embedded in practice.
This roundtable brings together evaluators and practitioners to explore these challenges and identify practical pathways for implementation. Through facilitated discussion, participants will share their practice insights on implementation opportunities, risk and design considerations. The discussion will inform the next phase of testing and implementation of the shared impact framework.
Participants will be invited to reflect on the following questions:
1.How can shared indicators be consistently applied across diverse place-based initiatives while remaining meaningful to local contexts?
2.How can shared impact approaches support learning and improvement without becoming compliance-driven reporting requirements?
3.What risks and opportunities should be considered when implementing shared impact approaches across the place-based ecosystem?
4.What is needed to support the implementation and uptake of the shared impact framework across the sector?
Authors: Eleanor Williams, ACE, Jade Maloney, ARTD, Jess Buchwald Did you grow up wanting to be an evaluator? For most of us the answer is no, and there is value in the way we have all fallen into evaluation profession from diverse backgrounds.
But what does this mean for our career pathways and the way others think of evaluation and evaluators? What does it mean for evaluation as a profession?
As the leading voice for evaluation in Australian, the Australian Evaluation Society has long considered options for and pathways to professionalisation that strengthen our roots as a society, and develop the routes to a future in which evaluation profession is increasingly recognised and valued.
The 2024-2028 AES Strategic Plan firmly put considering pathways to professionalisation back on the agenda. A working group has since been exploring options for professionalisation, drawing on learnings from the review undertaking by Peersman and Rogers in 2017, consistent with the AES values, and informed by the experiences of other evaluation associations and other professionalisation associations in Australia. Now it’s time to seek your views because professionalisation is for you, the Australian evaluation community.
Harnessing the success of the fishbowl approach to exploring quality evaluation that makes a difference at the 2025 conference, we are inviting everyone to jump in and share their thoughts about the value professionalisation would provide, and the risks to be managed to ensure the pathway are accessible, inclusive and respectful of diverse ways of knowing. The working group understands there are diverse views on professionalisation and invites these to be surfaced in this conversation.
The session will be facilitated by professionalisation working group co-chairs Eleanor Williams, Jade Maloney and Jess Buchwald with opportunities to contribute live or through written formats. The working group will use what you share in shaping the route forward.
And yes, there will again be chocolate fish rewards for contributors.
Just think: What would it look like if the next generation could grow up wanting to be an evaluator? What if when you became an evaluator you could see a clear pathway forward?
I work with government agencies, not-for-profits and citizens to co-design, refine, communicate and evaluate social policies, regulatory systems and programs. I am passionate about ensuring citizens have a voice in shaping the policies that affect their lives, translating research... Read More →
Eleanor Williams is the Managing Director of the Australian Centre for Evaluation and established the Australian Public Sector Evaluation Network in 2019. She is a former AES Board member and chairs the OECD's Public Policy Evaluation Experts group.
Eleanor is currently undertaking PhD research on evidence use in fast-paced policy contexts with supervisors at the University of Queensland and University College London and has a particular interest in rapid evaluation methods... Read More →
Friday September 18, 2026 11:30am - 12:30pm ACST Hall 2
Authors: Paula Shaw, ARTD, Syl Johns, ARTD This session, targeted at intermediate evaluators, explores the ethics of evaluation in the corrections context and the importance of including prisoners’ voices.
Incarcerated people are (almost by definition) excluded from public discourse. Our criminal justice system offers imprisonment; a deprivation of liberty, which includes severe restrictions on a person’s ability to communicate with the outside world, as its most common consequence for committing a crime.
Since the mid-20th century, when prisons were re-imagined as places of rehabilitation over places of punishment, criminogenic programs that aim to address the underlying causes of crime have been part of prisons’ remit. Prisoners themselves are arguably the key stakeholders in these kinds of programs, and yet, their voices are often absent in evaluation and other research and program development activities.
Prisons, as a context for program delivery and evaluation, are highly regulated and complex environments. Across Australia, prisons are chronically overcrowded and hold populations with very high levels of complex needs, disadvantage and trauma. First Nations Australians are also overrepresented.
Over the last five years, the presenters, (ARTD Associate Uncle Syl Johns, and Senior Manager, Paula Shaw) have worked on several evaluations of criminogenic programs, and between them, have interviewed well over 100 prisoners across Qld, and in SA, NSW, Victoria, WA and the NT. This session will be delivered as brief presentations and facilitated group discussions on each of the topics below:
•The ethics of inclusion of prisoners in evaluation projects – why it matters, what are the power dynamics at play, what are the risks for prisoners, and what do they get out of it? •The formal ethics processes involved – what are the key considerations? •Learnings from our work about practical approaches to engaging prisoners in evaluation interviews. – What has worked well? What hasn’t – and why?
