During 2011 and 2016, I held the Canada Research Chair in Evaluation and Health System Improvement. The objective of the chair was to experiment evaluation approaches with the aim to have positive impacts on the problem targeted by the intervention. After reading on the impacts of the human-led environmental degradation, I decided to reorient my research activities to support the implementation of positive regenerative actions. My current research program consists in developing evaluation approaches and tools contributing to planetary health.
Principle realizations: Between 2015 and 2019, she was the French editor of the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation/Revue canadienne d'évaluation de programme and I was a member of the editorial board of Evaluation and Program Planning. I have published in my career over 90 peer-reviewed articles. My recent articles offer pragmatic evaluation approaches for planetary health. Since 2021 I have been invited as a key-note speaker to talk about evaluation and planetary health at the European Evaluation Society Conference, the International Francophone Evaluation Forum, and the Quebec annual public health conference.
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.