Framing the future: Exploring the values that underpin the Australian Evaluation Society’s Evaluators’ Professional Learning Competencies

In the last two decades, evaluator competency frameworks have become ubiquitous. Many have been developed by reviewing the literature and engaging in various research processes to ask evaluation practitioners what they do, in order to determine what evaluators should know and be able to do. Due to this practice focused approach, the underlying philosophical and theoretical assumptions of competencies are rarely questioned. In this article, the authors explore this territory by categorising competencies using two taxonomies. Mertens and Wilson’s 2018 Program evaluation theory and practice provides a philosophical framework, and Schwandt & Gates’ 2021 Evaluating and valuing in social research provides a theoretical framework. The authors apply these frameworks to the three evaluation specific domains of the Australian Evaluation Society (AES) Evaluators’ Professional Learning Competency Framework as refined for the Learn Evaluation Assessment Platform in 2020. Findings of this exploratory study suggest that the AES ’ conception of evaluator competencies aligns primarily with Mertens and Wilson’s pragmatist/neopragmatist paradigm and Schwandt and Gates ’ expanded frame. The authors discuss implications of the results and propose ideas for further improvement and testing of this research approach.