A Culturally Adaptive Approach to First Nations evaluation consulting

Abstract

Cultural safety is of utmost concern across the evaluation world, particularly given the way that evaluation and research have historically been implicated in colonising practices of the West. This article aims to examine the meaning of cultural safety in the context of an Aboriginal majority-owned consulting organisation that provides evaluation services to organisations where First Nations governance systems and processes may be unknown. This is a critically reflexive article that considers how the dual aims of contributing to self-determination and building First Nations business capacity may be managed in such evaluation projects. We apply Duke et al.’s Culturally Adaptive Governance Framework to our own evaluation work in striving for evaluations to be experienced as culturally safe by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stakeholders and for evaluation outcomes to be relevant and useful from the perspective of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stakeholders and our clients. We then reflect on the implications for the evaluation, social policy and for First Nations business sectors.