by Alba Ximena Zambrano Constanzo, Vaite Trujillo Burgos, Mauricio García Ojeda, Francisca Román Mella
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 Community Strengthening in Urban Neighbourhoods: Psychosocial Dynamics in Vulnerable Contexts, which reports on a participatory evaluation of community strengthening processes carried out alongside urban communities in southern Chile.
The article is part of a broader comparative study involving five urban neighbourhoods: three in Chile and two in Brazil. This publication focuses specifically on the Chilean cases, developed in the city of Temuco, in the La Araucanía Region, areas marked by socio-spatial segregation, urban precarity, and a historically unequal relationship with public policy.
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.
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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.
At the beginning of 2024 we shared the article “