Advocacy and policy change evaluators navigate uniquely complex environments, made up of layers with many moving parts, and are actors typically in highly political spaces. Evaluators bring their unique components to the evaluation in the form of values, biases, and belief systems that are continually constructing the identities they take on within these environments. In turn, those identities influence which roles evaluators will take, such as collaborator or advocate, and bring biases that have the potential to impact their behavior and decision‐making as they evaluate advocacy and policy change endeavors. The authors of this article discuss how evaluator identity, role, and bias can impact advocacy and policy change evaluation; as well as describe how power and privilege may show up in advocacy and policy change evaluation praxis. The authors then challenge the reader to engage with teachings from Indigenous Evaluation practices that are naturally grounded in advocacy principles and employ reflexivity as a means of ensuring that their work is culturally responsive and supports the minimization of unintended harm. Finally, the authors present a reflexivity framework with the hope that this will support advocacy and policy change evaluation practitioners to be more intentional in how they critically reflect on their work, the layers of complexity in advocacy and policy change, and how their values and biases might be impacting their evaluation practice. The reflexivity framework serves to support the practice and incite further discussion on the use of reflexivity as a normal part of advocacy and policy change evaluation.

Programme theory (PT) development can prove challenging, as power dynamics among stakeholders and/or between the evaluator and stakeholders can be hard to navigate. An important part of the PT-development process is navigating the points of knowledge of a programme and merging them to gain accurate insight on the programme and outcomes. This process typically involves inviting the perspectives of different stakeholder groups and consolidating these perspectives in a visual depiction. This article analyses the PT-development process for the STEM + Families programme of the National Parent Teacher Association (NPTA), based in Alexandria, Virginia (United States). This initiative seeks to increase access to, interest in, and understanding of STEM careers and education pathways for all children, and especially girls, children of colour, and children living in low-socioeconomic communities. The article explores how dialogue, challenges and questioning, and reflection on organisational culture within the NPTA were core components of this process and the eventual PT-model development. In particular, this article will focus on how the PT revealed sources of tension and power dynamics, and illustrated the possibilities of and challenges to the evaluation process, from the beginning of the process to report writing. Finally, the article adds to the evaluation field, as it explores the key evaluation competencies and key learnings from the described process, which hold implications for PT-development processes more broadly. Explorations of situational analysis, reflective practice, and the political and contextual environment in which the evaluation is placed emerge as key considerations and essential skill sets in PT development.