by Gabriela Munares & Rebeca Lucas
Cities around the world, including many in Latin America, are incorporating artificial intelligence solutions into their urban services: video surveillance and facial recognition systems for public safety, traffic management, citizen services, waste collection and tourism promotion.
In many cases, this trend is advancing faster than the mechanisms for evaluating its social consequences. A good example is the case of security: cities such as Lima, Buenos Aires and Mexico City have deployed AI systems for the surveillance of public spaces without any systematic processes in place to evaluate who is disproportionately affected, what biases may be embedded in their algorithms, or how the rights of those being monitored are protected.
In contexts of urban vulnerability, evaluation is never neutral. Every evaluation reflects a way of seeing reality, deciding what counts as a problem, what is considered an achievement, and who gets to interpret it. From this perspective came the article 
When we set out to evaluate Co-Inspira, a peacebuilding initiative in Colombia, we knew we were facing an unconventional challenge. This was not about assessing a traditional intervention, but something far more complex: a Systemic Action Research (SAR) process that was, in itself, already a collective exercise in knowledge generation.
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.
In 
When I wrote 
Outcome Harvesting is a participatory method used to identify, formulate, analyze, and learn from the changes brought about by an intervention, especially when cause-effect relationships are complex or unknown.
In the past, people with disabilities have been left out of many aspects of life including research and evaluation. They have not usually been included in ‘mainstream’ studies about key topics such as health, education, WASH, gender empowerment, social and political participation, while other groups in populations are more routinely asked for their views and their qualitative data is collected.