Participatory Evaluation

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.