14 - The Empowerment of Stakeholders in Participatory Evaluation：Based on the Practices of NAIS

Abstract Information: Participatory evaluation is an approach of evaluation that actively involves the stakeholders or participants in the process of evaluating programs, projects, or initiatives. Recent years, NAIS has applied participatory evaluation to areas such as policy evaluations, project evaluations, and forum evaluations, and finds that the involvement of stakeholders would improve the evaluation’s effectiveness and relevance. On one hand, stakeholders bring diverse views and perspectives to the evaluation process, which can ensure the comprehensiveness of the evaluation and that all relevant aspects of the program or project are included. On the other hand, stakeholder’ participation can enhance the evaluations’ legitimacy and credibility by showing that the evaluation is transparent and diverse interests are being considered. Thus, it is essential to empower stakeholders to voice and enhance their involvement in the evaluation. This paper aims to develop a set of empowerment mechanisms in the whole process of participatory evaluation. When evaluation starts, evaluators would identify stakeholders and categorize them based on legitimacy, power and urgency. In this stage, empowerment is sharing influence over what is to be studied and how to conduct the evaluation. In the process of evaluation, empowerment involves helping stakeholders better understand the evaluation and express their opinions. Evaluators would adopt active interventions including capacity building to strengthen the analytical capabilities, group discussions to inspire peer learning and interviews for key problems to find the truth. In the end of the evaluation, empowerment requires providing feedbacks and enhancing the relevance of evaluation findings. This involves follow-up meetings to discuss the evaluation’s impact, ongoing opportunities for feedback, and support for stakeholders to continue using evaluation findings. What’s more, for evaluation of policy implementation or long-time projects, continuous tracking and assessing needs to build enduring empowerment mechanisms of stakeholders. With the increasing application of participatory evaluation, the roles of evaluators are changing. The actual evaluation team composed of experts in related fields and stakeholders, and the latter are dominant players in the process. Since the evaluation is more like a collective learning process, the evaluators would be facilitators of learning and processors of the complex range of voices and perspectives, which requires them to expand their existing roles and tasks, and share influence and power with stakeholders.