Amplifying Voices: Harnessing Stewardship for Systems Change

Abstract Information: Join us for a panel session discussing the pivotal role of stewardship in driving organizational and systems change. Our multi-generational evaluation team, alongside government commissioners, will unveil how developmental evaluation is supporting system change by amplifying the voices of local health and aged care stewards.

Australia’s Aged Care system is undergoing a comprehensive change towards more proactive, person-cantered, and community-driven care. At the heart of this evolution lies the concept of system stewardship, increasingly recognized as a cornerstone in government contexts across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Despite its growing popularity, what stewardship means in practice is not generally well understood and has, for the most part, been defined and described only at governance or chief executive levels. Our developmental evaluation initiative has deliberately sought to bridge this gap by cantering the voices and perspectives of regional stewards, who are the driving force behind reshaping the aged care landscape. These regional stewards live and work every day in local communities, and changes in their enabling conditions, relationships and experiences of what it means to be a steward are creating a suite of practices and actions that are reshaping the system from the ground up.

Our multi-generational evaluation team worked collaboratively with government department staff and regional stewards. This collaboration involved building relational trust and modelling approaches to collaborative sense-making, appreciative inquiry and problem-solving, and sharing collective experience and insights to support the ongoing development of the stewardship approach.

The panellists, including early and emerging evaluators and a senior public servant, will share their perspectives on the tensions, challenges, and opportunities for collaborative evaluative practice in large-scale systems reform.

The evaluation team has also had to be agile in design, flexible with planning, skilled with sense-making, and focused on regular feedback and communication. As the arc of the evaluation process moves into an outcome-oriented phase, we are now asking ourselves, in what ways can evaluation sustain a useful trajectory, continuing to support the system change occurring dynamically and responsively?