Thank you all for your insights and to Monica for summarizing the ideas! As evaluators, we often consider it is our responsibility to do better and we bear the responsibility of improving our practices. However, if the context is not receptive to collaboration, even best practices will have no impact. Contexts are not equal, some are favourable to collaborative approaches and will be eager to use evaluation results, other contexts are political- even polarized- and will likely use evaluations if strategically relevant, and some contexts are just not interested in evaluation results. In these last contexts, whatever the efforts you do to implement knowledge transfer best practices, nothing will happen. We called these contexts "knowledge swamps" in the article we published on evaluation use, some years ago : Contandriopoulos, D., & Brousselle, A. (2012). Evaluation models and evaluation use. Evaluation, 18(1), 61-77.
Understanding the characteristics of the context to anticipate the implications on evaluation use is, in my view, probably the most important thing to do. It will also help relieve the burden put on evaluators' shoulders often bearing most of the responsibility for the use (or non-use) of their results.
RE: How to Ensure Effective Utilization of Feedback and Recommendations from Evaluation Reports in Decision-Making
Canada
Astrid Brousselle
Professor
School of Public Administration
Posted on 25/08/2025
Thank you all for your insights and to Monica for summarizing the ideas! As evaluators, we often consider it is our responsibility to do better and we bear the responsibility of improving our practices. However, if the context is not receptive to collaboration, even best practices will have no impact. Contexts are not equal, some are favourable to collaborative approaches and will be eager to use evaluation results, other contexts are political- even polarized- and will likely use evaluations if strategically relevant, and some contexts are just not interested in evaluation results. In these last contexts, whatever the efforts you do to implement knowledge transfer best practices, nothing will happen. We called these contexts "knowledge swamps" in the article we published on evaluation use, some years ago : Contandriopoulos, D., & Brousselle, A. (2012). Evaluation models and evaluation use. Evaluation, 18(1), 61-77.
Understanding the characteristics of the context to anticipate the implications on evaluation use is, in my view, probably the most important thing to do. It will also help relieve the burden put on evaluators' shoulders often bearing most of the responsibility for the use (or non-use) of their results.