On 4th June 2024, CECAN hosted it’s 2024 Conference ‘Looking Back and Looking Forward: Closing the loop from evaluation to policy making’ at the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering. The hybrid 1-day event attracted a diverse audience of policy makers, academics, and evaluation practitioners.
The conference focused on the evolving landscape of policy evaluation over the last decade and anticipated future trends. Attendees explored how evaluation is increasingly integrated into the policy-making process, enabling more resilient and adaptive public policies in an era marked by complexity and uncertainty.
The morning session began with a keynote address by Siobhan Campbell, Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer at the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland. Siobhan’s presentation set the stage for a series of parallel sessions that reviewed the current state of policy evaluation, highlighting the latest advances and methodologies.
After a networking lunch, the afternoon sessions pivoted to future-oriented discussions. Topics included the impact of artificial intelligence on policy evaluation, managing uncertainty, and the growing influence of systems thinking. Paul Simmonds, UK Managing Director at Technopolis Group, delivered the afternoon keynote, offering insights into how the field might evolve in the coming years.
For those unable to attend, CECAN has made recordings of the keynote presentations available, along with downloadable slides from both Siobhan Campbell’s and Paul Simmonds’ presentations.
Additionally, please click here to read Martha Bicket’s blog “The Rise of AI Tools in Evaluation – Challenges and Opportunities”, which summarises key points discussed by delegates in the session “How might the rise of AI tools affect future approaches to evaluation?” as part of the CECAN Conference.
