The Shifting Locus of Control in Participatory Evaluations

Abstract

An evaluation project - ongoing for more than three years - will be used to show that shifts of authority between stakeholders are a major criterion for determining the evaluation process. Utilization, process learning, knowledge transfer, evaluative thinking, emancipation and democratization have become increasingly important facets of the evaluative process in participatory evaluations. This implies that greater authority to make decisions and to control the evaluation process has shifted towards the participants. Therefore, the focus is to ascertain who decides the characteristics of the evaluation in the course of its process. This article will look at the effectiveness of an evaluation and the utilization of evaluation results within a charitable organization. The authors analyse to what extent each of the 200 individual employees or the 23 teams within the organization have an impact on, and assume responsibility for, decisions that are crucial to them.