No abstract

Approaches to participation in evaluation rely on the principle of active participation by major stakeholders, including less organized groups, as fundamental to good evaluation practice. This process offers a number of advantages but implementation requires certain prerequisites. The goal of our article is to weigh up the advantages of participation and to examine the conditions necessary for approaches to participation in evaluation to achieve their objectives.

L'évaluation participative repose sur le principe d'une participation active des principales parties prenantes (dont les groupes les moins organisés) à l'exercice d'évaluation.Cette démarche présente un certain nombre d'atouts qui peuvent se transformer en limites quasi rédhibitoires si certains préalables ne sont pas remplis. La finalité de cet article est de discuter des avantages et des inconvénients de la participation, ainsi que des conditions à réunir pour que l'évaluation participative puisse atteindre ses objectifs.

No abstract

Citizens, due to a lack of participation in public decision-making, often exercise ‘counterpower’ when a decision is taken, which can result in delaying or abandoning public projects. This could have been prevented if power and counterpower had negotiated during the decision-making process. Democratic Evaluation brings such a simultaneous exercise of power and counterpower to public decision-making. The evaluation method that we are proposing must enable a democratic type of evaluation to be made operational. Our aim is to demonstrate that the implementation of Democratic Evaluation is only conceivable when Empowerment Evaluation, Participatory Evaluation and Multicriteria Evaluation are associated and considered as stages in the same evaluation process. This constitutes what we call a ‘ Model for the Operationalization of Democratic Evaluation’ (MODE).