Twenty-first century evaluators face an imperative to recognize their privileged role in navigating socially complex terrain in ways that are ethical, demonstrate sensitivity to local and global social inequities, and reflect awareness of contested views of reality. Social justice and equity are increasingly viewed as a foundation of practice, necessitating that evaluators learn how to address potential power imbalances occurring within evaluations, the larger contexts in which those evaluations occur, and the emerging profession itself. This chapter addresses how the 2018 American Evaluation Association (AEA) Evaluator Competencies may help evaluators direct explicit attention to issues of power, privilege, and equity. We discuss how these competencies can aid evaluators in honing their practice to support evaluation' s role in attaining social justice. We also spotlight some programmatic exemplars that offer insights and resources for this work.

The question of how best to integrate the views of underrepresented and marginalized groups in the evaluation process is of critical importance to many evaluation theorists and practitioners. In this article the Delphi technique, a method used to achieve consensus on a set of issues with the participation of all interested parties without incident or confrontation that could compromise the validity of collected data, is offered as a procedure for enhancing marginalized group participation in the evaluation process. Demonstrated by a case example, the Delphi technique is used to help ensure that all relevant stakeholders have a voice and that sometimes-silenced voices have equal influence. As a result, it is suggested that this technique lends itself to implementation with social justice evaluation models. The benefits of and lessons learned when using the Delphi technique to promote marginalized group participation and representation in evaluations are discussed.

In this section, recent books applicable to the broad field of program evaluation are reviewed. In most cases, a single book will be considered in a review, but in some instances, multiple books may be jointly reviewed to illuminate similarities and differences in intent, philosophy, and usefulness. In most cases, a single review will be commissioned for each book. Two or more reviews may be commissioned for books judged by the Editor and/or Book Review Editor to be especially noteworthy works in evaluation.

This chapter tells the story of American Evaluation Association' s (AEA' s) Competencies Task Force. During the 1990s, the AEA Board addressed issues related to the professionalization of the field, but chose not to move ahead with the development of competencies. Twenty years later, the global expansion of evaluation led to increasing professionalization around the world. In 2015, AEA' s Board created a Competencies Task Force to formally address the issue of developing evaluator competencies for the association. This chapter describes the threeyear development process: the Task Force formation, its processes, the multiple forms of feedback solicited and received, the eventual outcomes, and emerging follow-up strategies. It ends with a critique of the process by addressing what we believe the Task Force did well and what, in hindsight, it might have done differently.

We close this issue of New Directions for Evaluation by looking towards the future. In this chapter, the perspectives of 10 LGBTQ+ Evaluators whose voices and insights were not otherwise featured in this issue provide their critical insights on what LGBTQ+ Evaluation means to them, what it looks like in practice, and where they hope to see it grow in the future, including how the work of this issue of New Directions for Evaluation can be expanded and built upon. In closing the issue on a critical, futures-oriented note, we reaffirmThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.