Towards Decolonization of Evaluation Practices: A Critical Reflection of Participatory Evaluation Methodologies in Less Developed Countries

Abstract

For many years evaluation practices in less developed countries have been dominated by scientific, top down, quantitative approaches and methodologies. As the result, many evaluation practices in less developed countries have been largely characterized by skewed power relations with poor adoption and utilization of evaluation findings. Several researchers, writers and development professionals agree that participatory evaluation was adopted in Africa and elsewhere in the world as a strategy to address several weaknesses observed in the conventional evaluation practices. Such practices include too much focus on projects and donor funding, lack of inclusion, poor consideration of local variations, lack of transparency, lack of accountability and lack of ‘respect’ to local beneficiaries. Inversely, the adoption of participatory evaluation meant to promote evidence-based evaluation designs, which also pay attention to local variations and contexts and include local evaluators and collective decisions at local level. Therefore, promotion of participatory evaluation means making evaluation practices more culturally sensitive and relevant through the use of credible data. From the emancipatory perspective, participatory evaluation methodologies aim at making evaluation practices more transformational and empowering while improving power relations and collaboration between project stakeholders, capturing and bringing to surface the voices of once marginalized and disadvantaged populations. To a certain extent, the adoption of participatory evaluation methodology has contributed to the improvement of quality and relevance of evaluation and increased utilization of evaluation data and findings in decision making and organizational performance. This paper has generally shown that despite a few recorded successes such as the previous participatory methodologies, there have been internal and external constraints to participatory evaluations. There have been constraints to the participation of the targeted communities in evaluation such as limited lack of community interest, high transaction costs, lack of knowledge and skills and meager budget. At the project level, insufficient budget, limited resources, poor timing of implementation and poor quality of evaluation have constrained management participatory evaluations. This paper takes the position, that regardless of problems hindering the performance of participatory evaluation, its benefits outweigh its limitations in short and the long run. The paper recommends that in order to improve the performance and relevance of participatory evaluation, participatory evaluation needs to be preceded with well thought plans, selecting appropriate designs and methods to fit the local situations.