Brad Cousins, University of Ottawa Bessa Whitmore, Carleton University Lyn Shulha, Queen’s University CANADA IDEAS Global Assembly: Amman Jordan, April 2011

The Problem  Accountability vs. learning functions of evaluation of development  Think tanks on alternatives to the ‘statistical counterfactual’  Increasing popularity of collaborative approaches to evaluation  Important to get it right  Troubling recent developments: i) deconstructing dimensions of process; ii) visual representation of theory; iii) compartmentalization of CPE

Background  30+ year history of collaborative inquiry in development  1993 Fetterman and Empowerment Evaluation  CPE – TIG  Rise of Practical Participatory Evaluation P-PE  Cousins & Whitmore (1998): Framing PE

Participatory Evaluation as Collaborative Social Inquiry P RAGMATIC P OLITICAL E PISTOMOLOGICAL Problem solving Fairness Produce valid knowledge Two streams: Practical PE Transformative PE Three justifications

Cousins, J. B. & Whitmore, E. (1998). Framing participatory evaluation. New Directions for Evaluation, 80, Framing Participatory Evaluation

i) Deconstruction Re-visited  Daigneault & Jacob (2009)  Coherence  Parsimony  External differentiation  “We had it right the first time.”

ii) The Logic of Logic Models?  Alkin and associates: use LM in evaluation theory to  Compare  Training needs  Inconsistencies  Drawbacks  Rigidity, pre-ordinate  Risk of under-representing context, culture  Mechanistic representation of dynamic process

iii) Re-thinking compartmentalization  CPE: one big happy family in search of individual identity.  Why?  Lack of clarity in differentiation.

Accountability/Outcome/Impact Formative/Improvement Developmental Capacity Building Process Use Knowledge Transfer Context Call for Collaborative Inquiry What control should I have over the evaluation process? Who should participate? How engaged should participants be? Essential features of CI in E

Toward Coherent Principles for CI in E  Open, collaborative process involving evaluators and stakeholders  Working draft, subject to review and revision  Field test and develop evidence base.