Dear colleagues and friends,

In our RESOURCES section of EvalParticipativa, we have created an online repository of materials with a direct and explicit focus on the topic of participatory evaluation in general, and its theory and practice in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean in particular. We would like to share its content with you and invite you to contribute.

The aim of this RESOURCES section within the framework of the EvalParticipativa initiative is to make relevant and useful material from our field of interest available to everyone interested. The resources section includes three sub-sections:

1. Guides and Manuals, which usually stem from specific experiences of participatory evaluation and which use the lessons learned to highlight benchmarks in the evaluation process. Although some of the documents introduce conceptual discussions, the focus is on how to carry out evaluation processes with social participation.

2. Tools for participatory evaluation, these may be techniques, resources, methods or activities which facilitate and specify evaluations which have a participatory component at their centre. Many of these tools belong to or are suitable for Popular Education initiatives.

3. Participatory evaluation experiences and case studies,  make up the section that we would perhaps most like to expand with this project, revealing and deepening the analysis with specific instances and their participatory evaluation impact. In our understanding, these experiences are what validate the guides, tools and lessons learned so they can be adopted and adapted to other contexts.

Whilst a simple internet search brings up millions of links, our repository and its subsections has the clear objective of selecting quality resources. This implies applying a set of criteria which function as a “quality filter”, leaving only materials which are the most relevant and useful. We have been refining the following guidance points which are used to decide which materials are incorporated into the repository:

• • Documents and texts which have been published and circulated by universities and organisations, rejecting informal notes and narratives.

• • Evident presence of the ‘evaluation’ and ‘social participation’ elements. This means that while it is possible to incorporate content regarding participatory monitoring and/or follow-up, evaluation must also be present.

• • Priority is given to guides, manuals, case studies and conceptual discussions written in Spanish and generated in Latin America and the Caribbean. This leaves open the possibility to incorporate other materials which deserve to be added due to their significance.

• • They should be open access and accessible via the internet with no need for specific authorisations. For example, if it is a book or material scanned by yourself, it is possible that it is not openly accessible over the internet and could cause problems if authorisation is not requested.

You are therefore invited to look at and discover resources in the EvalParticipativa repository in the RESOURCES section and you can also share other material which you consider important so it can be included in EvalParticipativa. The opinions and commentaries which we can share regarding these resources will be valuable in deepening understanding and experience of participatory evaluation in the region and beyond.

We are sharing these ideas in the Virtual Forum and circulating participatory evaluation resources widely, some of which we will certainly add to the repository.  In this post’s comments, you can also add suggestions and ideas for increasing the quality and quantity of these resources.

Bye for now from the EvalParticipativa team!