From the Co-Editors: There's Always Room for Improvement: Building Better Practices and Methods for a Brighter Future

Abstract

Since becoming evaluators, we have observed how the fi eld of evaluation has grown and changed. Major areas of development we have witnessed include increased attention to evaluation capacity-building initiatives, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, as well as demands for more adaptive evaluative strategies and techniques for improving the quality of evaluation planning and resulting evidence. Many of these areas of development in evaluation practice are in response to increased national and global complexity and uncertainty. Although the fi eld has evolved in response to these challenges, we recognize that there is always room for improvement. We anticipate ongoing complexity and uncertainty as contemporary political, social, economic, and environmental shifts take place in our world. As such, we desire to push the fi eld toward a more inclusive, adaptive, restor-ative, and effective evaluation praxis. This desire led us to assemble evaluation scholarship for this fi rst issue of volume 44 in the form of fi ve articles, a commentary, and a section on experimental methodology, including three articles. Separately, the articles in this issue extend the fi eld of evaluation ’ s development in the areas of evaluation capacity building (ECB), responsive and equity-oriented efforts, vigilant evaluation practice, and effective methodology. Collectively, the articles address the growing complexity of our world, providing insights and techniques to build better practices and methods for a brighter future. In the fi rst article, Gregory Phillips II, Dylan Felt, Esrea Perez-Bill, Megan M. Ruprecht, Erik Elías Glenn, Peter Lindeman, and Robin Lin Miller propose an evaluation orientation that is responsive to the LGBTQ + community ’ s interests and needs. They abbreviate into LGBTQ + individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and Two-Spirit, inclusively along with other sexual and gender minorities; and they consider the intersectionality of these identity traits with those who are “ also Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), those who are dis-abled, and those who are working-class, poor, and otherwise economically disadvantaged, among