Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation

Abstract

Defining, compartmentalizing, and differentiating among stakeholder involvement approaches to evaluation, such as collaborative, participatory, and empowerment evaluation, enhance conceptual clarity. It also informs practice, helping evaluators select the most appropriate approach for the task at hand. This view of science and practice is presented in response to the argument of Cousins, Whitmore, and Shulha (2013) that efforts to differentiate among approaches have been ‘‘unwarranted and ultimately unproductive’’ (p. 15). Over the past couple of decades, members of the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation Topical Interest Group (CPE-TIG) have labored to build a strong theoretical and empirical foundation of stakeholder involvement approaches in evaluation. This includes identifying the essential features of collaborative, participatory, and empowerment evaluation. It also includes highlighting similarities and differences among these three major approaches to stakeholder involvement. Our primary disagreement with the article by Cousins et al. concerns the value and appropriateness of (1) differentiating among the stakeholder involvement approaches; (2) misleading characterization; (3) confounding and comingling terms, and (4) using collaborative inquiry as the umbrella term for stakeholder involvement approaches.