Compare methods

	Participatory Evaluation	Empowerment Evaluation
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1998	1994
Originator	J. Bradley Cousins & Elizabeth Whitmore	David Fetterman
Type	Collaborative, stakeholder-engaged evaluation approach	Participatory, capacity-building evaluation approach
Seminal source	Cousins, J. B., & Whitmore, E. (1998). Framing participatory evaluation. New Directions for Evaluation, 1998(80), 5–23.	Fetterman, D. M. (1994). Empowerment evaluation. Evaluation Practice, 15(1), 1–15.
Aliases	Collaborative Evaluation, Stakeholder-Based Evaluation, Practical Participatory Evaluation	Fetterman Empowerment Evaluation, Self-Determination Evaluation
Related	4	4
Summary	Participatory evaluation is a family of approaches in which stakeholders — program staff, beneficiaries, community members — are engaged as active partners in conducting the evaluation rather than as passive subjects of it. In their influential 1998 framing, J. Bradley Cousins and Elizabeth Whitmore distinguished two streams: practical participatory evaluation, oriented to improving program decisions and use, and transformative participatory evaluation, oriented to empowerment and social justice. What unites them is shared control of the inquiry, but they vary along dimensions of who participates, how much control they hold, and how deeply they are involved.	Empowerment evaluation is a participatory approach in which an evaluator acts as a coach and critical friend, helping program staff and community members evaluate their own work so as to foster improvement and self-determination. Introduced by David Fetterman in his 1994 presidential address to the American Evaluation Association, it deliberately shifts control of the evaluation to the people running the program. The goal is not only to assess merit and worth but to build the group's internal capacity for evaluative thinking and to embed evaluation as a routine, owned part of organisational life.