aes26 International Evaluation Conference

Authors: Ian Falk (Mission Australia), Paul Royce (Mission Australia)
This presentation shares reflections from a multisite, multimethod scoping study exploring the conditions required for young people to have safe, appropriate and connected places to live across urban, regional and remote communities in the Northern Territory.

Working across diverse places and communities, we found that the evaluation itself became an iterative and responsive process. Rather than following a fixed methodology, the approach continually evolved in response to relationships, local context, emerging insights and the knowledge shared by young people, community members, practitioners and service providers. Existing evidence was held alongside place-based knowledge, with each informing and challenging the other throughout the project.

The presentation explores a layered evaluation approach that combined evidence review, relational consultation, storytelling, semi-structured interviews, program case studies, iterative reflection and ecosystem mapping. Importantly, the evaluation process made visible the significant knowledge, expertise and practical wisdom already held by people working and living in their communities—knowledge that is often overlooked by conventional evaluation approaches but proved essential to understanding both the challenges and the possibilities within local systems.
Rather than positioning adaptation as a limitation, this presentation considers emergence as a source of evaluative insight. As understanding deepened, both the evaluation questions and methods shifted to reflect what communities and practitioners identified as most important. This process revealed that young people’s housing experiences are shaped less by individual circumstances than by broader structural conditions—including housing supply, service design, family relationships, mobility, cultural obligations and place—and highlighted how local knowledge is critical to interpreting these dynamics.

We hope to share not simply the findings of the project, but the evaluation journey itself, inviting discussion about how relational, place-based and emergent approaches can strengthen evaluation practice in complex settings. Rather than moving quickly to judgement, this layered approach offers a way of generating deeper understanding, making local expertise more visible and informing more responsive policy, service design and systems change.