Greetings fellow EvalParticipativa colleagues,
Earlier this week we took part in the gLOCAL 2023 roundtable discussion, CHALLENGES IN PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION: A FEMINIST AND DECOLONIAL APPROACH. The activity was organised jointly with Kalidadea, a feminist consultancy network, working in the field of international cooperation and development.
Evaluations entail several different challenges including ensuring that the process empowers those involved by achieving a sufficient level of effective participation across a diverse set of participants. Another challenge is to ensure meaningful gender mainstreaming and a move towards feminist evaluations rooted in human rights.
The aim of the roundtable was to create space for reflection on these challenges and on how to integrate participatory and feminist approaches successfully into our evaluations in a way that is relevant, effective and appropriate to the groups we work with, be they local communities or the general public.
Our speakers—Esteban Tapella from PETAS, Lara González Gómez, director of Kalidadea and Alejandra Lucero Manzano, member of PETAS and Kalidadea— introduced some of these challenges and suggested ways to overcome them. They shared concrete strategies and ecofeminist principles intended to contribute new perspectives for developing empowering evaluation processes based on a decolonial perspective. The roundtable was moderated by Vanesa Castro (a PETAS researcher). You can click the link below to watch the recording which includes a Q&A session with the participants.
The gLOCAL Evaluation Week is a unique knowledge-sharing event, connecting a global community of people across sectors and regions. Over the course of a week, participants join events—in their own regions and further afield—to learn from each other on a vast number of topics and experiences. By helping participants understand how their work fits in with monitoring and evaluation (M&E) ecosystems in their region and the larger M&E community worldwide, gLOCAL helps to inspire and energise a global movement: individuals and organisations that value the power of evidence to improve people’s lives. gLOCAL, is convened and supported by the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI), a network of organisations and experts that supports countries with strengthening their M&E systems in order to help governments gather and use evidence that improves the lives of their citizens.
We were delighted to take part in this event again this year!
The year 2020 will turn, without a doubt, into a watershed year for multiple and diverse realities. While we are still in the middle of the pandemic, in contexts characterised by huge incertainties, it is a good moment to reflect on the reality of evaluation in general and participatory evaluation in particular, especially in this long and extended moment that we are living through. This reflection often goes hand in hand with the (re)planning of activities and objectives that have been disrupted and troubled by lockdowns, illness and financial crisis.
We are convinced that mutual learning lies not only in what we have in common, but also, perhaps even more so, where we differ. For this reason, we hope you will take advantage of the fantastic opportunity that this forum offers to identify similarities and differences between both initiatives. Thus, in this post we will briefly describe our work and invite you to join us in reflecting on some questions that can guide us. We are already very grateful for your participation.