Reflections on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Participatory Evaluation
by Angie Pereira Calvo
A few months ago, I sat for more than two hours with a group of women, listening to their experiences with a social program. There was no recorder running. I held no questionnaire. There was silence, pause, chocolate, and a trust that had taken weeks to build. In that conversation, I learned more about the real determinants of access to health services than from any dataset I had ever processed.
I genuinely wonder what part of that conversation an artificial intelligence (AI) system would have captured. And I also wonder what part of it we would have sacrificed if the methodological emphasis had been placed on the efficiency of data processing rather than on the quality of listening. This, in my view, is the central question the Latin American evaluation community must ask itself right now: before the adoption of AI tools silently redefines what we mean by participation.
We are pleased to present Episode 14 of the EvalParticipativa podcast, now in its new AI-assisted format. This episode explores an ongoing debate within the field of evaluation, drawing on the 
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What happens when those who have historically been evaluated become co-evaluators? How can such a change be fostered, managed, and capitalized upon? Is it possible to promote participatory evaluation from within public institutions? How?
‘Readiness’ is an English language term that is difficult to translate into Spanish as it encompasses various themes: preparation, availability, propensity, timeliness, agility, competency, willingness – among others. In the Spanish version of this entry, we use ‘availability’ (‘disposición’) with the understanding that it covers the other themes. In the field of evaluation, readiness is foremost across the first two steps of Utilization-focused Evaluation (UFE) as proposed by Michael Quinn Patton (2008). Readiness is also referenced in other fields, for instance in communication strategy design (Ramelan, 2014).
I’m genuinely delighted to share a personal take on Chapter 7: Participatory evaluation of a public transport support policy: an inclusion and transformation perspective – Jalisco (Mexico), recently published in the book Evaluation, Democracy and Transformation: Experiences of Participatory Evaluation in Latin America. I co-wrote it with Sugey Salazar and Selene Michi, and together with other colleagues we reflect on what it really means to carry out public policy evaluation using participatory approaches from within the public sector.
