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Paper short abstract:

We tell a story of the collaborative development of evaluation processes supporting government engagement in remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. Accounting for these dual and situated evaluation practices involves an analytic shift to an engagement with cosmopolicy-in-practice.

Paper long abstract:

A turn to practices has become a popular analytical move in policy studies. Many scholars have pointed out that policy-making and implementation need to be studied as interrelated practices that participate in the making of _the world_ (Freeman and Sturdy 2015, Gill et al. 2017, Ureta 2015). However, there has been less discussion about policy contexts where different worlds (cosmologies, ontologies, normativities) meet. In this paper we tell such a story based on our ongoing fieldwork in an Indigenous community in Australia. More specifically, we tell a story of the collaborative development of evaluation processes supporting government engagement in remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. Located within community meetings where government and Aboriginal community members interact, these evaluation processes were designed both as interventions into business-as-usual, and as means for providing feedback on moments where differing governance practices intersect. We argue that accounting for these dual and situated evaluation practices involves an analytic shift to an engagement with cosmopolicy-in-practice.