A socio-political framework for evaluability assessment of participatory evaluations of partnerships: Making sense of the power differentials in programs that involve the state and civil society

Abstract

Jointly conducted with a coalition of HIV/AIDS community-based organizations (CBOs), this evaluability assessment sought to better understand the factors that affect the feasibility of a participatory program evaluation to be undertaken in partnership with the CBOs’ non-governmental-organization members and public-health agencies. Participatory evaluations and partnerships are grounded in social and institutional authority structures that unavoidably influence researchers and evaluators. The construction of a theoretical framework for socio-political evaluability assessment of participatory evaluations is a necessary precondition for the coalition’s members to engage effectively in evaluation research with other partners.

Evaluations, international agencies and censorship: A field doer’s viewpoint

“…Informal structures must be taken into account in order to understand and work on the relationships between formal structures (institutions) and informal social networks, which establish a symbolic-cultural logic in Latin American contemporary societies (Lomnitz, 2008). International agencies impose a hierarchical, vertical alignment and power relationships that colour a socially desirable discourse, which restrains the establishment of trusting relations between the 'insiders' and the 'outsiders' (Laperrière, Potvin and Zúñiga, 2012). We cannot analyse answers given within group encounters if we pay no heed to the political and social context in which these communications took place.…”