by DW Academie

Innovation is no simple task. This is especially true when it is intended to promote citizen participation in such a way as to foster constructive and respectful dialogues. For these dialogues to be successful, ongoing creative processes must be maintained. This is true for all institutions and organisations that seek to encourage civil society participation in political processes and decision-making in the hope of creating modern inclusive societies.

As if the challenge of involving civil society in public processes was not already significant, there is the additional and growing issue of digital exclusion which certain communities are encountering given that a growing number of political opportunities require the use of new technologies despite the fact that not all communities are equally digitalised.

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by Andrés Peregalli

Tell me how you evaluate and I will tell you what kind of education you promote

The complex world that we inhabit values measurements and their virtues, often to an excessive degree. We thus live with the constant pressure to capture and make sense of learning that is taking place among individuals, groups and institutions.

Within such a context, the evidence that results from an evaluation instrument will be used as a proxy. In the best-case scenario, it is a solid and robust proxy. I once heard it said that evaluation in a university setting involves one person who is terrified (the student) and another who is bored (the lecturer). While all images are unfair to a point, this characterisation (still very common) is useful for identifying concepts/representations that allude to ways of understanding education, learning, teaching, evaluation and participation, and the effects they have on those who experience them. To put it another way: tell me how (what, why, when, who, where…) you evaluate and I will tell you what kind of education you promote.

This post describes a participatory evaluation experience in an undergraduate university setting. More specifically, it describes a Theoretical-Practical Seminar (TPS) within the department of Philosophy and Theology at the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) that has been running for 10 years and is based on the Service-Learning (SL) pedagogy. The experience exemplifies a more profound epistemological and evaluative approach and another way of understanding teaching and learning. These political-pedagogical and didactic foundations are consistent with the educational model we are striving to pursue: a process of humanisation centred around the people who teach and learn. In this approach, there is no room for terror or boredom. Rather, the focus is on agency so that learning can flourish, be enjoyed and celebrated.

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By Patrick Okwen, Nange Lisette & Leonel Ayafor

Prelude to the Two Rivers

“Once upon a time on the planet Earth, science gathered loads of data from hard work by assiduous scientists. Unfortunately, this data was hidden behind barriers of complex scientific terms, financial paywalls, and languages that were not comprehensible to everyone. This River of Science flowed downhill but was not accessible to all. Then came the River of Stories, the storytellers worked with researchers to break down scientific language into stories, remove paywalls, and tell science stories in simple local languages. The two rivers flowed downhill and were now accessible to all” (Le Nomade).

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by Ana Rojas Viñales

The aim of this article is to highlight the need to institutionalise the valuable, yet still incipient, efforts being made in Paraguay to establish a culture of evaluation.

Why does Paraguay need a National Evaluation System (SNEP)?

Over the past 20 years, Paraguay has been working towards developing a system for the evaluation of public policies, with significant support from multilateral banks and bilateral cooperation. One of the most important advances has been the identification and measurement of the supply and demand for evaluation, together with a diagnosis of institutional and professional capacities to evaluate policies, programmes and projects.

If we consider the IDB’s Monitoring and Evaluation indicators (2015), Paraguay has only 0.7 points out of a possible 5, which highlights the need to strengthen the country’s evaluation capacities and supply. The National Evaluation Capacity Index (INCE) can be used as a snapshot of the situation in Paraguay in terms of evaluation in five dimensions (institutional structure, supply, quality, multi-agent spaces and use), showing the challenges and opportunities for the SNEP.

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by Linda Raftree 

Back in the 2010s, the world was buzzing about the potential for digital tools to revolutionize and democratize most everything – SMS for community feedback loops, mobile phones for citizen journalism, open data to improve transparency and accountability, social media platforms for people to make themselves heard without needing to be part of the elite, and networks so that social movements could organize in resilient ways at very low cost.

A decade later, there have been enormous shifts and changes that have benefited participation. However as often happens, these spaces have also been appropriated and taken advantage of by those who are seeking to maintain their status and power.

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by Raquel Luján Soto

Participatory Action Research (PAR) emerged in the 1970s as an alternative to the technocratic methods of top-down research, which continue to be widely used to this day in the field of agricultural sciences.

These technocratic methods have not proved capable of involving farming communities in sustainable land management and are often abandoned at the end of the research process.

On the one hand, PAR arises from the need to recover the local knowledge of grassroots farming communities and recognise the value of the diversity of the agricultural practices and natural resource management methods they use in food production, biodiversity conservation and in creating a multifunctional landscape, as well as the ways they have maintained agroecosystems sustainably over centuries.

On the other hand, it also emerges from the necessity that researchers and local communities jointly identify customised solutions capable of addressing their needs and objectives in order to ensure they are more positively received and more widely adopted in the long term.

The PAR approach involves the development of horizontal relations between farmers and researchers based on the premise that research should be carried out through a ‘dialogue of knowledge’ and with recognition and respect for the rural communities, their knowledge and the ways they manage their relationship with nature. This idea will be further explored in this post.

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Lessons from using a Theory of Change in a Participatory Evaluation

by Viola Cassetti and Joan J. Paredes-Carbonell

Our professional paths crossed in Valencia in 2016, when Viola was finishing her European Master in Public Health (EuroPubHealth) and about to start her PhD at the University of Sheffield (UK) and Joan was working as Deputy Director General of Health Promotion at the Valencia regional health authority.

Our first project was to adapt the NICE guidelines on community involvement to the Spanish context using a collaborative approach. We spent two years co-coordinating a group of more than 80 professionals who actively participated in the project. You can acess the guide (only in Spanish) by cliking on it (Cassetti et al., 2018).

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