BOOK ON EVALUATION, INCLUSION AND DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA: EXPERIENCES AND LESSONS

OPEN CALL

A while back, we began working with colleagues in the region on the concepts of evaluation, inclusion and democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the new EvalParticipativa project (2023-2024) we plan to revisit these ideas and produce a book on the subject. Our aim is to identify participatory evaluation experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean, analysing dimensions of inclusion and democracy, and emphasising the learning components generated by these experiences.

The book’s target audience is made up of individuals who are responsible for designing and carrying out evaluations, in the hope of increasing their awareness of the possibility and feasibility of conducting evaluations with civil society participation. We seek to bring this awareness both into their consciousness and onto their agendas. The book is intended for Latin American bodies that provide capacity building and training in evaluation, in the hope that it will make available real cases of evaluations carried out with the participation of civil society in the region. Our target readers are teachers and students in diploma courses, master’s degrees or other specialisations focused on evaluation and social planning, in the hope of influencing the training of professionals who will in the future be conducting, commissioning, supervising and assessing participatory evaluations in the region.

how to participate?

In this document we present a general, preliminary overview of the aspects we intend the book to address. We are clear that the focus should be on presenting one or more existing evaluation experiences as the core data for analysis, without excluding the possibility that some general remarks or proposals may be added where appropriate. In other words, a substantial part of each chapter should be devoted to a descriptive and analytical account of one or several evaluation experiences, while a smaller part may be dedicated to more general or propositional reflections that build on the first section.

This brief post is therefore an invitation to friends and colleagues of EvalParticipativa who are interested in contributing a chapter to the book to email their ideas to eval.participativa@gmail.com.

We will select the chapters that will be included in the book from the submissions we receive. We thank you in advance for sharing this announcement with colleagues and contacts interested in these topics.

Best wishes,
The EvalParticipativa team

EXPERIENCE CAPITALISATION: LEARNING BY DOING

by Jorge Chavez-Tafur

The term “experience capitalisation” is increasingly used to refer to the process of describing and analysing a project, programme or specific experience in detail, and producing lessons that can be shared and used to improve development interventions.

As in a systematisation process, this approach is believed to help identify specific innovations and practices, and -above all- to understand the reasons behind their successes or failures. One of the major benefits of an experience capitalisation process is that it involves all those who are -or were- part of the experience.

But how do we promote such a process, and what are the steps to be followed? And once we have decided to go ahead, how do we facilitate the participation of different people? These were some of the questions that we asked ourselves at the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) about five years ago, prompting us to initiate a project together with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Financial support was provided by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). From 2016 to the end of 2019, the project responded to the need to develop specific skills for describing and analysing specific experiences, identifying and disseminating lessons and recommendations, and putting these to use. Working in different parts of the world and focusing on analysing the steps that should be taken in processes of this kind, the project sought to encourage the adoption of a capitalisation process at different levels. To this end, we sought to capitalise on the experience we had embarked upon, to learn lessons about the process itself and to validate the approach followed.

Continue reading

Aligning agendas to promote participation in public policies

por Susana Menéndez-Roldán, María Dolores Torralbo-Obrero y Salustiano Luque-Lozano

A few months ago, the Practical Guide for Participatory Planning and Evaluation of Public Policies: Mainstreaming Participation (available in Spanish) was added to the EvalParticipativa Resources section. We, Susana Menéndez-Roldán, María Dolores Torralbo-Obrero and Salustiano Luque-Lozano, from the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration (Andalusia, Spain), have written this post to tell you more about this guide.

Citizen participation is the best way to achieve social inclusion. It is, after all, one of the goals included in the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda (SDGs). More specifically, it aims to promote peaceful and inclusive societies that can achieve sustainable development, facilitate access to justice for all people, and build effective, inclusive and accountable institutions at all levels. Gender equality is another important goal to ensure the full and effective participation of women and equal leadership opportunities at all decision-making levels in political, economic and public life.

Continue reading

Empowerment evaluation: new materials at EvalParticipativa

by Pablo Rodríguez Bilella

As outlined in the planned activities for EvalParticipativa’s second stage, we are keen to keep adding to the RESOURCES section of our community of practice and learning.

As our colleagues and friends already know, the section already hosts a wide variety of testimonial videos, guides and manuals, tools, case studies and significant lessons. We highlight new and updated material that we add to the repository on our social networks, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn: another reason to follow us online!

In this post, we want to highlight four recent additions to the Guides and Manuals section. They all share a clear theme: the empowerment evaluation approach. Although participatory evaluation is the general or umbrella term that refers to stakeholder involvement in evaluation processes in Latin America, the same is not true in the Anglo-Saxon context, where nuances between different evaluation approaches that include or involve stakeholders are more commonly accentuated.

Continue reading