There are urgent calls to decolonise global public health. Within the field of evaluation specifically there is an evolving movement, stemming from indigenous scholarship from the Global South, to advance evaluation methods, theory, and practice through the application of approaches that are decolonial and equitable. This has been highlighted in a 2023 special issue of the Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation focusing on this topic.
While several distinct approaches to decolonial and equitable practice in evaluation have emerged, this body of work broadly challenges evaluators to reflect on the power imbalances stemming from colonial relations and white supremacy and to interrogate methodological and epistemic orthodoxies inherent to their discipline. The emphasis is on centring local and indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing in deciding what and how initiatives are to be evaluated as means of making evaluative practice more just as well as producing better, more useful evidence to inform policy and practice.
The Centre for Evaluation (CfE) is in a pivotal position to promote decolonial methodologies and equitable practice in evaluation among its members and the wider LSHTM community. Many CfE members have expressed a need for guidance and direction to relevant resources to support the integration of related best practices into the design and conduct of their evaluations.
In this endeavour, we launched a workstream on decolonial and equitable approaches to evaluation in 2023.
Launching the Centre's workstream on decolonial & equitable practice
In our first activity, we aimed to facilitate the sharing of good practice and to support CfE members and LSHTM colleagues to embed decolonial methodologies and equitable practice in their evaluations. To achieve this, we will:
- conduct a scoping review of the existing literature, frameworks and best practice for decolonial methodologies and equitable practice in evaluation.
- convene a series of events involving key scholars in decolonial methodologies and equitable practice in evaluation.
- synthesise evidence and best practices from the scoping review and event series to produce a set of guiding principles for decolonial methodologies and equitable practice in evaluation, an accessible resource repository and a multi-media output.
The project was supported through an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) grant to Ruth Ponsford, Seyi Soremekun and Meghna Ranganathan and the research was led by Sali Hafez and Agata Pacho with support from Mitzy Gafos and Lucy Platt.
Since our initial workstream, we have made progress with the following items:
- Seminar on May 2024 with Prof Bagela Chilisa: Decoloniality and Indigenous methods in global health evaluation
The first seminar by Prof Bagela Chilisa (University of Botswana) on ‘Decoloniality and Indigenous methods in global health evaluation’ (May 2024) attracted 241 participants globally, highlighting the relevance of this work.
Listen to this recording of Professor Chilisa’s presentation.
- Scoping review
The CfE team conducted a comprehensive review of practical guidance and frameworks on decolonising and equitable evaluation methods in the global health, international development, and humanitarian aid literature (May-September 2024).
They synthesised evidence from 59 papers (October-December 2024). Findings revealed four main approaches to decolonial and equitable research practices in evaluation including:
- Indigenous frameworks that centre relationality, land-based knowledge systems, and community-driven approaches to evaluation.
- Decolonial and anticolonial approaches that explicitly challenge colonial power structures and question Western evaluation norms.
- Culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) that integrates cultural and contextual relevance in assessment methodologies, ensuring that evaluation processes align with local values and worldviews.
- Participatory approaches that emphasise community ownership, empowerment, and reciprocal knowledge exchange, challenging traditional top-down evaluation practices.
Findings highlighted some important tensions in the literature around the plurality of paradigms, evaluator positionality, and who should conduct evaluations. They also identified a lack of empirical evidence of the effectiveness of decolonial and equitable methods in practice as a key shortcoming of the existing literature.
Read this viewpoint written by the team on methodological pluralism in implementation science published in Lancet Global Health.
- Reflexive guide
Findings from the review have informed the development of a reflexive guide to support individual and team based reflexive practices across the five evaluation phases. The guide provides reflexive prompts for each of the evaluation phases including questions, stories or wisdom, resources and considerations to help support more decolonial and equitable planning and implementation of evaluations.
We welcome feedback on the guide, please email [email protected] with any thoughts on how you used it, what was useful and any recommendations for improvement.