aes26 International Evaluation Conference: Full Schedule

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12:00pm ACST

Creating impact culture empowered by evaluation: building bridges and blurring boundaries during a merger

Friday September 18, 2026 12:00pm - 12:30pm ACST

Authors: Virgina Thomas, Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao, Stewart Graham, Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao, Helen Percy, Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao
A culture of impact, empowered by evaluation, encourages accountability and learning, supporting projects to focus on outcomes, demonstrate efficacy and make improvements. Fostering such an environment promotes success, yet can be challenging to achieve, requiring leadership, communication, adaptability, capacity and capability building, and resources.

Our paper discusses the (co)creation of impact culture, and evaluation systems and tools, in the Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao, a new public research organisation created by merging four of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Crown Research Institutes (CRIs). Establishing an impact culture in this new organisation requires building bridges and blurring boundaries between the organisations and systems that have been merged.

While the four CRIs all had systems and tools to plan for and evaluate impact, the approaches were unique to each organisation, as were their impact cultures. Since the merger, colleagues have collaborated to bring the previously separate systems and tools together into a new evaluation ecosystem.

In our paper we focus on creating a cohesive impact culture, empowered by evaluation, through i. inter-organisational dialogue, ii. building an enabling environment for evaluation that is adaptable to different needs and functions, and iii. disseminating evaluation tools and resources and promoting evaluative thinking across organisations through collegial networks.

Using our experience as a case study, we will inspire our audience to reconsider the impact and evaluation culture, systems and tools in their own organisations using real time polling (e.g., Mentimeter) to encourage reflection and participation.

We draw on the work of Blundo and Canto (2019) and Ferre (2025) on building an evaluative culture including: creating a system that is adaptable to the different needs and functions of the legacy organisations, fostering dialogue across and beyond the evaluation sector to include fields such as economics and social science, and building capacity, capability and resources for evaluation.

Chair

Kira Duggan

Group Head, Child and Family Wellbeing, Safety & Harms, Australian Institute of Family Studies

I am a social policy evaluation specialist and have worked with a broad range of government agencies and community service agencies across Australia and internationally. My experience is in advising on program evaluation and design; evidence-based policy and strategy development... Read More →

Speakers

Virginia Thomas

Impact Specialist, New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science Limited

I'm an Impact Specialist at the Bioeconomy Science Institute | Maiangi Taiao, Aotearoa New Zealand's largest public research organisation. I work with research teams to plan for impact and then evaluate progress towards outcomes. I'm particularly interested in fostering impact culture... Read More →

Friday September 18, 2026 12:00pm - 12:30pm ACST
Waterfront 3 Stokes Hill Rd, Darwin City NT, Australia

Boundaries and bridges

Format Short paper
Audience Level Intermediate, Advanced
Industry Natural resources and energy, Environment and climate change
ID 124

aes26 International Evaluation Conference

12:00pm ACST

Kira Duggan

Virginia Thomas

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