By Eleanor Williams, Managing Director of the Australian Centre for Evaluation
All governments strive to deliver an evidence-based approaches to policies and programs that can achieve positive outcomes for the Australian community. The current APS reform effort has a firm emphasis on building our internal capacity to deliver high quality evidence for government decision making.
In line with this important objective, the Australia New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) and the Australian Centre for Evaluation were delighted to jointly sponsor Dr Dan Levy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government for a program of events in January drawing on Dr Levy’s extensive experience in building capability in impact evaluation and evidence-informed decision making.
Dr Dan Levy from Harvard Kennedy School and Eleanor Williams, Managing Director of the Australian Centre for Evaluation
The central event for this series was a large-scale hybrid workshop hosted by the APS Academy in Old Parliament house on the topic of impact evaluation. With over 470 people registering from the Australian Public Sector Evaluation Network (APSEN), the APS Evaluation Community of Practice and the broader APS, the interactive workshop showcased international examples of rigorous impact evaluations and tackled the practical challenges that evaluators face when implementing these projects. This session was recorded and is now available from the APS Academy’s resource library.
This event was followed by a senior executive roundtable hosted by the Behavioural Economics Team Australia (BETA) at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet with a focus on how to improve the supply, demand and productive use of evidence for policy-making. This session was attended by senior representatives of a range of government department and agencies who play an important championing role for evidence within their agencies. The event was facilitated by Andrew Nipe, the Chief Consulting Officer and lead for the newly established Australian Government Consulting.
Key themes from this discussion included the value of:
- both technical and soft skills within agencies to generate, translate and communicate high quality research and analysis to inform decisions;
- curiosity and a ‘scout mindset’ from system leaders in understanding whether policies and programs are working and why; and
- synthesising a range of perspectives and developing a good understanding of context to determine how to continually improve policies and programs (and stop them when required)
- being an advocate for the people that you serve rather than the programs you deliver.
And finally the program of events was rounded out by a workshop with the Australian Centre for Evaluation and Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh drawing on Dr Levy’s experience of successful culture change in government. This session emphasised the importance of having a clear, collective mission of improving the quality, volume and use of evaluation, and the need for champions and advocates at all levels and across portfolios in order to achieve system level change in the APS.
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