Balancing Power Relations in Evaluation Commission: A New Voice with Unique Features

Abstract Information: Kopanya is an online ecosystem the connects evaluation commissioners and competent evaluators, engaging them in a koCreation process with evaluators bringing their technical expertise to the evaluation design process, and commissioners contributing their knowledge of the evaluand’s context, and together create more impactful evaluation designs. On Kopanya, commissioners select evaluators based on a combination of evaluators’ subjective ratings of their American Evaluation Association (AEA) competencies and the more objective ratings of other commissioners who have engaged evaluators during koCreation processes to create a new, refreshing, yet balanced perspective of evaluators’ competencies. Maldonado-Torres (2006) calls for decolonizing the evaluation process because it is characterized by long standing patterns of power that have come to define labor, relationships, and knowledge production. By engaging commissioners and evaluators in a koCreation process that involves the assessment of both parties’ evaluation competencies, Kopanya is refreshing new voice that equalizes power relations and addresses the concerns both commissioners and evaluators harbor about the commissioning process being characterized by Western value systems, overly reliant on trust and not competencies, employing poor evaluation design, insufficient understanding of the evaluand’s context, and low adaptive capacity for evaluation. And among external evaluators, Kopanya redresses power relations by providing a consortium option that makes the proposal and budgeting process transparent and available for all involved, irrespective of whether consortium members are from different organizations based in the Global South or North. Using a participative approach our demonstration of the Kopanya ecosystem will showcase its unique features like rating and interpreting evaluator competencies, koCreating impactful evaluation designs, pooling evaluator skills in competitive consortiums, receiving feedback on the evaluation process in real-time. Additional features that will also be covered include developing RFPs on Kopanya and spotlighting them. This will offer participants to explore a sandbox environment with existing users (as evaluators and commissioners) exposing them to the different perspectives on the Kopanya ecosystem.