what do those terms mean? Fit for whose purpose? Relevance to whom? Efficiency for what and at what cost? The third thing to point out is that in several countries, evaluators were not present during fundamental national conversations about Covid. In Australia, for example, the national committees saw the involvement of academics, think tanks and other experts, but not evaluators. This lack of involvement of evaluators resulted in a data vacuum, which other knowledge providers moved to fill in. Evaluators are now struggling to catch up. Ray We haven’t learned a lot in the evaluation community. In part, this is due to the fact that the community did not take a proactive stance to the COVID-19 issues. There are still many fundamental questions about the pandemic that the evaluation community has not addressed. It’s unfortunate, because we are left guessing. The community has not stepped up. Evaluators have not been seated at the right tables. In the US and in the UK, for instance, nobody talked to evaluators. A lot of conversations took place with epidemiologists and medical people, but not with evaluators. As a result, certain questions never got asked. What space does the notion of ethics have in evaluation and, more so, what role does evaluation have in helping to foster the ethical conduct of large bureaucracies? Pearl As a lawyer, I find it shocking that legal norms are treated in the same way as soft standards like ‘efficiency’, for example, in many evaluation ethics standards. There rarely is any differentiation made between what we have to do, and what we should or could do. Treating compliance with legal standards as if they were just one of many non-prioritized ethical issues is very problematic. Compliance with international human rights standards should be non-negotiable. Especially for UN agencies. I actually think that evaluation units within the UN should be audited by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on a systematic basis, and that there should be independent reports issued. This does not mean that other ethical standards are irrelevant but there is a massive difference between a legal standard that is binding in law and other things like relevance, efficiency and the like -- all these things are important, but they are not legally binding. Ray This has a lot to do with standards, which are malleable, permeable and largely ill-defined in the 28
Ida Lindkvist
