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(Credit Music)
Hi.
I'm Brad Cousins. Well, participatory evaluation
has been around for quite a while now, probably more than 30 years.
It's got its roots in international development but
say over the last twenty years or so it's really gained popularity
in the West, in particular in North American contexts.
So on the one hand we have a growing body of research on participatory
evaluation
but on the other, there's still lots of confusion
and that's my motivation for doing this
little video
segment. It's because first of all I'd like to cover the essentials
of the approach -- the basics -- and then I'd like to clarify some
misconceptions about it. Finally, I'm just going to
talk a little bit about future directions for
ongoing developments for research in practice.
In my mind it's evaluation first and foremost but it's
it's evaluation where trained evaluators work in partnership,
and they work with program or project stakeholders to produce
evaluative knowledge.
Now, it's an approach, it's not a model,
it's not a design. It's got flexibility, and fluidity, it can take different
forms in different contexts. So we like to think of it as an approach.
Well, there are three main justifications.
The first one has to do with practical problem solving.
So this is what we call a pragmatic, or instrumental justification:
we want to make the program better; we want to
address some accountability needs;
we have practical problem solving
with which to deal. So that's a justification for doing
a collaborative approach such as participatory evaluation.
A second one would be skill building or capacity building,
working with people to help foster self-determination and
action. This would be a very much aligned with, you know,
international development interests but it's
really a political or transformative justification.
And it has a lot to do with helping people to understand
their strengths and to build on those. A final justification
is developing at deeper levels our understanding in
meaning of complex phenomenon.
This is a philosophical or epistemological justification.
So with each of these justifications, it's going to be a question of
emphasis depending on particular purposes. Quite a while ago with Bessa Whitmore
we identified
two principal streams of participatory evaluation.
The first one is ‘transformative’ participatory evaluation
and it's very emancipatory and empowerment-oriented.
Here's where we're using evaluation to leverage social
action. The second strand we would call
practical participatory evaluation, and this
is more associated with
practical problem solving and it's very much utilization-oriented.
Each of these two streams would draw from the three justifications that I've just
mentioned.
So it's a question of degree and emphasis. I think both streams are very
much interested in deeper understanding and meaning.
So, I mentioned that this is a partnership. That means
evaluators are involved and non-evaluator stakeholders are involved.
So if we have a partnership, partners bring different things to the table.
From the evaluator's perspective, they're going
to bring standards of professional practice,
and they're going to bring knowledge of evaluation logic
and skill. They may have some knowledge of the program and some knowledge of the
context, but that's not their strong suit.
It is the strong suit, however, of the program community members.
They know the program context because they live there, and they know the
program function because they work in that
context and they experience the program first hand.
They may have some knowledge of evaluation logic and standards,
but it seems to me that that's likely to be,
usually a bit more limited than not. I’ve got to say a lot of the
work that we do is
practical participatory evaluation. And the kinds of settings that I find
that works best would be
in a formative improvement oriented context.
If you've got a hard-nosed, summative, judgmental question
it may not be the right to opportunity to do participatory evaluation.
Also there would be a reasonable consensus on issues, you don't have a lot
of controversy about what the programs or projects are trying to accomplish.
There's got to be commitment there, organizational and program
practitioner commitment, commitment from the community,
and so on. Finally, there should be a good resource base.
Resources in terms of time and money and personnel.
Bessa Whitmore and I also developed a little
framework that talks about three different dimensions
of collaborative inquiry. You might think about these as
semantic differential scales. The first one is
‘Who controls the evaluation technical decision making?
Is it the evaluator on the one hand, or the stakeholders, on the other?
Secondly, stakeholder selection for participation.
We want to make sure that we've got the right people selected to
participate in the activities.
Now there could be a limited group of folks involved
or it could be much more broadly defined and diverse in many respects.
The third dimension would range in terms of
involvement in the technical evaluative activities
of the stakeholders. So at one end it could be rather limited involvement, more
of a consultative kind of role,
toward the other end which would be much more deep in terms of
engaging in all the technical activities
of the evaluation. If we look at this particular graphic
we can think about these fundamental dimensions
of participatory evaluation, collaborative inquiry in evaluation,
as being orthogonal or independent. If we look at it in this three-dimensional way
we can differentiate different types of participatory evaluation.
Here we can see that practical participatory evaluation
and transformative participatory evaluation
are both kind of, it's shared control between evaluators and stakeholders.
However, where they really differ is on the diversity of stakeholder involvement.
With practical it's much more primary users, people who can really do
something with the evaluation.
On the other hand, in transformative contexts, it's likely to be a broader
group because we're talking about
democratic deliberation and decision making and discussion
and there's lots of opportunity for dialogue.
We can see also in this graphic the more conventional stakeholder-based
evaluation,
where evaluators are very much in control, and the role
of program stakeholders is more in a
consultative kind of role. So this framework has worked well for us to
differentiate different
types of participatory evaluation or different genres of it.
Here's another graphic that I think
speaks to some interests that we… ongoing interests we have
in developing principles for collaborative inquiry.
So first of all we have, you know, a call for collaborative inquiry;
there has to be some kind of impetus for the project
in the first place; what are its specific purposes?
That has yet to be determined, and that's determined through the lens of context.
Here we can see it's represented
as a prism, and out of that prism there could be all kinds of different purposes
that might arise depending on what the context
holds. So, there's a lot of different
goals and interests that can be addressed in accomplishing participatory
evaluation,
but, you know, given once we've developed those and have come to an understanding
of them, then it's a case of looking at what form will it take.
And here's where we bring in the three-dimensional framework.
We talk about, you know, who controls the decision making, we talk
about who should we involve as participants
and we talk about to what extent should they be involved.
So I think this is a really great way to think about participatory evaluation
because
it really speaks to the fluidity of it,
how we need to be guided by a set of principles in order to decide just what
it's going to look like in practice.
And in fact that's a project that we're working on now, myself with Bessa Whitmore
and Lyn Shulha, we're actually considering the development through
working with evaluators to understand, you know, what are the important
principles
through which we can decide what participatory looks like in practice.
So there you have it, some thoughts about some
basic information about participatory evaluation
and a little bit of clarity around some of the important
elements of it, and some thoughts about future directions.
Thanks for listening.
(Credit Music)