Evaluation in the Pacific Doesn't Need Inventing — It Needs Naming

I spent three days at ANZEA 2026 in three different roles: speaker, stand-in, and listener. By the end, they'd all circled back to the same question.

It started on Day One, at the Pasifika Fono where it allowed our pacific groups to connect with each other. Later in the Ignite sessions, I gave a talk called Reclaiming Evaluation: The Pacific Way. The question behind it: are we actually changing how evaluation gets done in the Pacific, or just changing who fills in the same external frameworks? I built the talk around Epeli Hau'ofa's idea of a sea of islands — not small, isolated states cut off from each other, but a region held together by kinship, relationships, and shared values. That framing matters because the pressure runs the other way. Countries and sub-regional blocs get approached one at a time, and alignment with someone else's ideology tends to arrive bundled with the funding, the infrastructure, the support. The “capacity building” language around Pacific evaluation still assumes the design comes from outside. So the real tension isn't whether support is offered — it's whether it's locally led, or just locally administered.

My argument: a Pacific way of evaluation isn't something anyone needs to invent. It's already here — relational, oral, collective, values-based, and practised for centuries by our navigators, our farmers, our fisherfolk, by anyone who ever had to judge whether something was working and decide what to do next. It isn't only a different way of knowing. It's a different way of being, and a different sense of what's worth valuing. The job isn't to build it — it's to name it. That same session had Margaret Eastgate on Mana-enhancing MEL, the Pacific Rebbilib and the Kakala Framework, and Seraseini Vulavou and Vani Nailumu from Balance of Power on Vanua-Centred Evaluation — different threads, same day, each probably worth its own post at some point. Later that afternoon Maciu Silai walked through the evaluation craft behind Fiji's scabies trial which showed some practical experiences of our local practice.

Day Two, I was the stand-in — presenting on behalf of my team, Unaisi Manulevu and Marilyn Vilisoni, on Noda Ilakolako (Our Journey), our account of the MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning) work my company, Mua'akia Consulting, has been doing with the iTaukei Trust Fund Board (TTFB) supported by the Market Development Facility (MDF). We didn't dress it up. The session sat with four honest questions: do Indigenous organisations already have their own way of doing MEL; how much has Western thinking shaped the tracking systems they're stuck using, and can that actually change; what's the right role for an outside consultant (or external actor) in that kind of work; and what has the experience been in practice, so far.

Day Three I had no slides — but I did have a seat, on the closing panel of reflections and provocations, and when ANZEA asked me to sit on it, I suggested they invite Seraseini Vulavou in my place instead. She took the seat and did far more with it than I would have. Sera opened in Fijian, thanking ANZEA for sharing its home: for hosting the Pasifika Fono for its own NZ-based Pacific community, then opening that invitation to neighbouring Pacific people like her and me. I might have helped her think and craft through what came next, but she's the one who said it. “Our Pacific MEL communities of practice are seedlings, only just starting to sprout — fragile, but alive. We fly a long way, at real cost, to reach conferences like ANZEA and the AES because we don't have one of our own yet. We look at what our Māori brothers and sisters have built here over the last few decades — something distinctly theirs, done with them and never for them without them — and we dream of the same. Our own Pacific association and conference. Our own fono we don't have to fly far from home to attend. It's how we've always done things regionally: small islands banding together”. This is why I have partnered with Talanoa Consulting to start Insight Pasifika which potentially could play this role.

Then came Sera's final provocation, aimed as much at herself as at the room: the Pacific has been independent since the 1970s. Fifty years. So why is our evaluation community only now taking root — is that on us, or is it the system, meaning the international development system? If it's the system, she said, the question belongs to everyone in that room: what part have you played, and what part will you choose to play next? I might have opened Day 1 with a question about reclaiming our evaluation, but Sera closed it with a sharper question, and it's the one I'm actually carrying home.

Fai'aksia and Vinaka Vakalevu.