Evidencing the emergence of healthy Indigenous communities through Ground Up monitoring and evaluation

This paper focuses on our Ground Up monitoring and evaluation research
in two community development projects where local Yolŋu researchers and Elders supported university-based researchers to reconsider their understanding of what ‘evidence’ is, and how it works in monitoring and evaluation. In these projects, local Yolŋu researchers insisted that strong practices of monitoring and evaluation were always already being undertaken by Elders and Traditional Owners guiding and shaping the unfolding networks of kin in place. In re-presenting this work here, we suggest that, evidencing good community development did not involve ‘collecting evidence’ as practice of data gathering, or ‘making evidence’ through collaborative knowledge work. Instead, it involved ‘making evident’ to partner organisations the character of particular Indigenous sovereign knowledge and governance practices, and the flourishing that these practices enable. We suggest that such considerations are important in the context of recent Australian Government commitments to Indigenous valuation through its Indigenous Evaluation Strategy (2020) and, more broadly, in policy realms that impact Indigenous Australian life.