The United Nations Evaluation Group norms and standards for evaluation are now available in all UN languages - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Read them - spread them - use them! You can find them here.
In recent years I have been involved in large reviews of evaluations in the development sector, studying a couple of hundreds of evaluation reports. Many of the evaluations would have been vastly better if they had complied with, or at least been inspired, by evaluation norms and standards. I don't say that every evaluation must attain the quality of rigorous scientific research - in the opposite, time and resource constraints usually don't permit rigorous research in the context of evaluations, anyway. But you can still try to make it useful.
At least, evaluators must make sure they respect the rights and safety of people who participate in the evaluation - i.e. ethics. Otherwise, the harm caused by an evaluation might outweigh its benefits.
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