Empowerment Evaluation

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.