gLOCAL Evaluation Week: Yes, gLOCAL - it is not a typo

By
Mariana BrancoLeo Lemes
CLEAR
gLOCAL
IEG
BE_blog_gLOCAL.png

This week's guest blog is in support of the gLOCAL Evaluation week - a series of free events taking place around the globe and online between June 3-7 2019.

In this blog, Leo Lemes, Operations Officer, and Mariana Branco Moreira, Evaluation Consultant, both writing from the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group and affiliated with the CLEAR Initiative, introduce the gLOCAL Evaluation Week and suggest ways that you can get involved.

We’re Leo Lemes, Operations Officer, and Mariana Branco Moreira, Evaluation Consultant, both writing from the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group and affiliated with the CLEAR Initiative – Centers for Learning on Evaluation and Results. Today we are introducing you to gLOCAL Evaluation Week, where simultaneous, evaluation-related events are occurring across five continents during June 3-7, 2019. These events will be large and small, in-person and virtual. Please visit the website to learn more and participate.

What was the inspiration for gLOCAL Evaluation Week?

gLOCAL evaluation week combines two forces in today’s evaluation landscape: global knowledge shaping local evaluation practices and local experiences influencing global evaluation thinking. gLOCAL Evaluation Week aims to catalyze these two forces, contributing to raising M&E awareness and knowledge-sharing efforts globally.

Topics such as fighting climate change and protecting refugees have a global nature, but both topics require local action to address them. The concept of local and global forces acting in tandem is not new. The idea of localization derived from the Japanese word “dochakuka,” which originally meant adapting farming techniques to one’s local condition. Later in the 1980s, the concept of “glocalization” emerged in sociology as a part of a meaningful discussion on globalization, which often refers to the trend of global homogenization. Glocalization stresses the idea of contemporary globalization influencing the local level of society and the localization of globality. To learn more about the topic, read more from a pioneer of glocalization, Roland Robertson in Global Modernities. Glocalization: Time, Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity. Sage Publications. London (1995).

What does glocalization have to do with evaluation? Evaluation themes, practices, and capacities today are simultaneously global and local. These issues benefit from synchronized, accessible and inclusive spaces for international discussion and debate. Most prominent M&E conferences have a regional nature and reach different target audiences and countries at different times of the year. As such, it impossible to convey all perspectives into one articulated vision around the state of evaluation debate. And not everyone can afford the travel and time costs of attending key international evaluation conferences such as the AEA, EES, IDEAS, and other regional events. Such costs result in a lack of access to the international evaluation debate by critical stakeholders causing a loss of perspective and optimal engagement.

gLOCAL Evaluation Week and its platform have the following features:

  • bringing together of professionals interested in evaluation topics;
  • holding events during the same week;
  • allowing for in-person and virtual events;
  • involving a combination of scholars, policymakers, civil society members, practitioners, and others to discuss M&E and evidence-based decision making;
  • decentralizing power structures by allowing anyone to propose an event under the gLOCAL Evaluation Agenda;
  • requiring events to be offered free of charge;
  • minimizing the additional expense of travel and conference fees as events are occurring in hundreds of local agencies and cities; and
  • producing (post-event) a proceedings report to convey information on the nature of local evaluation events taking place at a single point in time around the world.

gLOCAL Evaluation Week will, thus, serve as a synchronized, collaborative, and widely accessible inter-regional space to promote evaluation discussion and debate.

Are you interested in being involved?

Visit glocalevalweek.org to learn more. We invite you to do the following:

  • Organize an M&E knowledge-sharing or networking event between June 3 and 7, 2019. Go to the CLEAR Initiative to submit an event proposal;

  • Promote gLOCAL Evaluation Week through your networks and channels. More information is available at the CLEAR Initiative; and

  • Encourage everyone to participate in gLOCAL Evaluation Week events. Go to the CLEAR Initiative to see the 2019 Calendar of Events.

Below are some useful links to learn more. We hope to see you at gLOCAL Evaluation Week!

Useful links:

Watch

In the video below, IEG's Director, Alison Evans, introduces the gLOCAL Evaluation Week:

Back to top