Publisher's Synopsis
Participation is viewed generally as a positive activity, certainlyin the context of democratic societies. Although still contested insome quarters, the idea of stakeholder participation in evaluationis now widely accepted within the evaluation community. Yet themeanings, even the purposes, of stakeholder participation inevaluation remain diverse, multiple, and thus clouded in manycontexts.
This volume presents participatory evaluation (PE) as a viableand creative addition to the contemporary repertoire of evaluationapproaches. The authors address three basic questions: what isparticipatory evaluation, in what contexts is it most useful, andhow does one actually do it in practice.
The two primary themes in the volume are what we identify as thethe principal streams in PE: practical participatory evaluation(P-PE), which is pragmatic and has as its central function thefostering of evaluation use; and transformative participatoryevaluation (T-PE), which is based in emancipation andsocial-justice activism and focuses on the empowerment of oppressedgroups. In addition to discussing these two streams, historicallyand philosophically, the volume examines the practical challengesof PE, by presenting it as a process of engagement and byillustrating PE through diverse case examples. Critical reflectionon both practice and theory offers valuable insights into andlessons about participation and evaluation.
This is the 80th issue of the quarterly journal NewDirections for Evaluation.
