Governing with Uncertain Evidence: AI, Public Institutions, and the Contested Landscape of Decision-Making in South Africa

Participants will leave the session with a grounded account of how AI is changing evidence generation and use at two levels of the South African government, including what is working and what is not. They will gain an understanding of the governance gaps that open up when AI tools enter M&E systems faster than accountability frameworks can adapt. They will hear directly from a major technology company about how it understands its obligations to the public institutions adopting its infrastructure. Furthermore, they will have a clearer sense of the questions evaluators, programme managers, and oversight bodies should ask of any AI tool entering their evidence workflows. The session develops the concept of evaluative accountability for AI infrastructure, the idea that evaluation's role is not only to use AI tools responsibly but to subject those tools to the same standards of scrutiny applied to any other intervention.