If you were to ask a young person what they’d like to be when they grow up, chances are they wouldn’t respond with ‘evaluator’. This rings true with many in the evaluation profession, but it is precisely because of this that many evaluators experience an interesting and circuitous route to get here. The Accidental Evaluator is a blog series from IOD PARC that explores the ways in which our colleagues, longstanding and newly acquainted, experienced or recently initiated, ended up in the evaluation profession.
For our third instalment, we spoke to Andrea Steigerwald, consultant and executive support at IOD PARC.
From cultural anthropologist to local government evaluator
Andrea Steigerwald is a cultural anthropologist by training whose interest in monitoring and evaluation was sparked as a postgrad. Born and raised in the Netherlands to American and Canadian parents, she developed an early curiosity about belonging, identity and intercultural issues. She relocated to the USA as a teenager, and then moved to Canada to pursue higher education in cultural anthropology, a field which brought together her interests in intercultural communication and social science research.
“When I say I am interested in intercultural issues, I mean things like climate action, diversity, equity, inclusion, and conflict, fragility and migration – all of these thematic areas involve deep intercultural complexities. As a child of expats, I grew up hearing the term ‘cross-cultural’, but now I prefer ‘intercultural’ as it captures the exchange between cultures, how we’re changed when we engage in a meaningful way with someone that differs from our worldview, and the beauty of finding common ground. After grad school I realised I loved social science research and intercultural complexity, but I wasn’t sure where to go next with my career.”
Andrea was asked in grad school whether she knew what monitoring and evaluation was – to which her answer was ‘no’, but the question prompted her to look into the field and think about what social science research might look like as a career outside academia. At the time she was working in Bolivia as part of her master’s, researching how gender equity NGOs participated in the Bolivian women’s movement alongside other state actors and social movements. Once she got back to the US, getting a job in evaluation was a case of ‘right place, right time’, and she started working as a research and evaluation analyst in a local government agency in Oregon.
Andrea in an impromptu interview for a radio programme by a local journalist in El Alto, Bolivia, when she was attending a gathering of cross-sector stakeholders working to advance gender equity in Bolivia.
The journey to international evaluation
Andrea’s role gave her the opportunity to learn about evaluation ‘on the job’ and to work with more experienced evaluators. She realised quite quickly that doing internal evaluation, for a government to understand the work it was funding, came with complexities.
“…it brought up questions for me very early on about power dynamics and the role [and] the complexity in evaluating the programme if you’re also the funder. I was working with partners, and while I was not the one making funding decisions, some people saw me as a government representative coming in, and were afraid about what I might find and saw me as more of an auditor. In this environment, building trust and relationships takes a long time.”
After connecting with the local evaluation network, Andrea’s next role took her into the field of external evaluation with a small, private consulting firm working on social service and education projects within the United States – here, every project was different, and Andrea built up project management experience and was able to try her hand at evaluation commissioned by government agencies, education institutions, and charities. But international evaluation felt like the next step, given it would align more with the intercultural questions that had led her to the social sciences in the first place. After a relocation to Scotland, she joined IOD PARC.
Leading with learning
Reflecting on the value of evaluation, Andrea emphasises the importance of creating spaces for reflection and learning and her belief that it should be a collaborative process. She, like many other evaluators, sees the challenges of balancing accountability and learning in evaluation and believes evaluators need to be flexible and adaptable in our constantly changing world. Building on her roots as a cultural anthropologist, her drive is to help people reflect on the stories they can tell with their information – so they can learn from their experiences and do more good.
“I’ve been on projects where I wondered if I had contributed to longer-term change. We don’t know all the details of our client’s daily work, the complexities of the systems they work in, and what happens after we wrap up the project. But we team up with subject matter experts and work with the client to develop a deep understanding of their context. We help organisations formulate learning questions and think about evidence differently, which excites me. We gather people together, bringing different perspectives to the table. Sometimes, these people haven’t had the chance to actually sit down and reflect together before. I see evaluation ideally, as creating spaces for reflection and slowing down amidst the busy implementation churn and saying, what change are we trying to achieve? How do we know that this works? What do we want to learn and what are other ways of looking at this problem that we haven’t considered?”
This reflective, more human side of evaluation, whilst being Andrea’s ideal, can take a backseat when budgets and time are squeezed – but she has seen momentum building around a more nuanced approach within her work at IOD PARC. Working alongside Erica Packington, one of IOD’s principal consultants, Andrea has been involved in longer-term learning partnerships that explicitly aim to create space for reflection and accompaniment– and despite the advocacy and influencing needed with funders to champion these kinds of partnerships, it is worth doing.
“With learning partnerships, what’s interesting is it’s actually not leading with evaluation. It’s leading with learning. Evaluation is one tool in the toolkit that’s done at the right time with the right group of people – it becomes part of a bigger learning agenda. Our offer includes facilitation and sense-making, accompaniment, and organisational development for funders and their funding partners. I think organisations are realising the value of learning but I hope that it doesn’t become another buzzword. Learning doesn’t just happen – it requires time, trusting relationships, the right people in the room with diverse perspectives, and thoughtful facilitation.”
Embracing complexity and learning by doing
On the future, Andrea is clear – she’s still relatively new to evaluation and can see challenges and momentum for both her own career and the field at large. “No one becomes an accidental heart surgeon”, she says, but she sees that her journey has been characterised by learning by doing and watching others work. It is the interdisciplinary, non-linear road to evaluation that gives it such potential to be an inclusive field and that makes working with her coworkers from a range of backgrounds so enjoyable. She comes back to her social science roots again and again – asking questions that will guide her work over the coming years, such as how she can use her position and privilege to ask questions about power that might shake things up. How can IOD PARC, as an organisation, build on its localisation work to centre the voices and experiences of the people directly involved in the programmes we evaluate and help the field be less extractive? And how can we find those little ins to ask the difficult questions with our clients?
“…When it comes to asking clients the difficult questions, I am learning by watching other experienced consultants, I have asked them, how do you ask the hard question that the client maybe doesn’t want to hear? They’ve shown me that you start with building a trusting relationship and understanding a client’s principles and values. Then when it comes to a client’s processes and outcomes, you can say “You said climate action was important to you. You said equity was central to what you do. Let’s talk about what equity means for you and for the people you fund. Let’s talk about the gaps in the evidence and who we haven’t heard from”. That’s where the critical friend role comes in – finding your entry point so that you can make sense of information together and hopefully have an influencing role and contribute to systems change.”
She comes back to the idea of leading with learning – and how evaluators can help people reflect and meaningfully learn in a world moving at a faster and faster pace. This, Andrea says, involves the evaluator also pausing to learn, embracing complexity across the evaluation process and prioritising accessibility so that our partners and clients are able to truly make the most of having us alongside them.
