How the work actually gets done.
An evaluation is shaped as much by how it was commissioned, staffed and paid for as by the methods written into the inception report. Those decisions are usually invisible to everyone except the people they affect.
Four commitments follow: how the practice contracts with the people who deliver the work, how it handles safety and safeguarding, how it discloses AI use, and how it behaves when a finding is unwelcome. Each applies on every engagement, whether that's a remote document review, a mixed-methods evaluation with field teams, or a bespoke tooling build. Each is specific enough to be held to, and applied consistently rather than where it happens to be convenient.
Written agreements. Named credit. Terms honoured.
Work begins after the contract is signed, not before, not on trust that it will be signed later.
Every engagement with an associate, consultant, local partner or field team member starts with a written agreement naming scope, rate, timeline and payment structure. Training is paid work at a rate agreed in advance. Where work is cancelled or cut for reasons outside the person's control — a security stand-down, a change in access, a client-side delay — the cost of that decision does not transfer to them, and costs incurred for the assignment are reimbursed rather than absorbed.
Field team members, associates and local partners are named in evaluation team lists where they consent to be, not folded into a generic “local enumerators” line. References are provided as a matter of course, and methods are shared during the work rather than extracted from it.
The person doing the work is the one who judges whether it can be done safely.
Risk assessments are inputs to that judgement, not overrides of it.
Safety briefings, insurance and communications plans are in place before deployment, not assembled retrospectively. Where a team member judges a location, interaction or route unsafe, that assessment is respected: nobody is expected to complete an assignment they consider dangerous, and no rate structure, quota or client pressure is allowed to make that expectation implicit.
Safeguarding is not only a fieldwork concern. Remote interviews carry their own risks around confidentiality, retaliation and data handling, and are treated with the same discipline. Confidential channels exist for raising harassment and safeguarding concerns, including where the concern is about a client. PSEA and Do No Harm expectations apply to Meridian as strictly as to the programmes being evaluated.
Every deliverable declares how AI was used.
Transparency is a delivery commitment, not a legal disclaimer.
Every deliverable includes an AI transparency annex: which models were used, for which tasks, what was human-reviewed, and what was excluded from AI processing entirely. Disclosure at the level of the specific output, not a general statement about the firm.
No synthesised quotes. No claims that can't be traced back to source. Every AI-assisted coding pass has a human re-code sample and every citation is verified twice. Sensitive data is handled with explicit consent and minimum necessary collection; affected populations are not training data.
Findings not softened. Disagreements documented.
Evaluation that survives contact with a difficult finding is worth commissioning. Evaluation that doesn't isn't.
The value of an evaluation is what it tells the commissioner they don't already know, including the inconvenient parts. Findings are not softened to preserve a relationship, and disagreements with programme teams are documented in the report rather than smoothed over in revision. Where a client asks for a change that affects the substance of a finding, the reasoning is recorded and the decision made in writing.
Scope discipline runs both ways: no silent expansion to justify a higher fee, and no silent expansion accepted from a client without a written amendment. Payment terms with associates and partners are honoured on Meridian's cashflow, not conditional on the client's.