Letter from the Programme Coordination Team

At the end of 2019, when we introduced you to the call for abstracts for the 2020 EES Biennial Conference, we spoke about access to information and the challenges of living in a time of post-truth. Since then the importance of data, facts, and ethics have taken centre stage as the Covid-19 Pandemic has threatened to scorch our societies without care for national boundaries, ethnicities, religions, genders, etc. The anthropocene concept could not be more pertinent, the challenges we face couldn’t be more real. While unfortunately Covid-19 has forced us to postpone the conference by a year (6-10 September 2021, it has also brought about reflection and highlighted gaps in our thinking as evaluators.

Despite the postponement, please be assured that we remain committed to delivering on our promise: an opportunity to share knowledge and experiences and further develop our profession. The postponement will delay our ability to share face-to-face. Still, we will utilise the time afforded to us by the conference’s postponement to promote further collaboration and dialogue. In the spirit of the EES we will take the following steps to both acknowledge your efforts, ensure that the conference in 2021 remains current and exciting, and promote your ability to share your contributions:

• All proposals will be subject to peer review in the coming weeks. Reviewers may contact you directly with proposals, suggestions and comments
• Submissions will be reviewed with a special focus on identifying those which may be apt for submissions as papers to the Evaluation Journal for review.(https://journals.sagepub.com/home/evi). Authors will be contacted.
• Submissions that may excel as online events will be identified and authors contacted.
• A discussion platform for authors will be launched, in order to allow authors to engage with each other on specific discussion topics.
• Authors will be able to make modifications to their submissions in January 2021. Similarly, a short interim period for new submissions will be opened. Authors who have already made three submissions (the maximum available) will be able to submit a fourth contribution.

While we are saddened that we cannot welcome you in Copenhagen as planned, our focus now is on everyone’s health and wellbeing. We very much look forward to welcome you in Copenhagen in September 2021.

Ananda S. Millard, Olha Krasovska and Mads Teisen
Programme Coordination Team