The Transformative Power of Participatory Evaluation: A Conversation with Claudia Olavarría

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The Transformative Power of Participatory Evaluation: A Conversation with Claudia Olavarría
In this interview, Feminist Evaluation Specialist Claudia Olavarría discusses the transformative potential of participatory evaluation in advancing gender equality, human rights, and sustainable development.
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14 January 2025

"Participatory evaluation can catalyze important and sustainable change, serving as a tool for evidence-based decision-making," says Claudia Olavarría, Feminist Evaluation Consultant for the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) and an expert in the use of methods that integrate gender and human rights issues into participatory evaluation.

The Center for Learning on Evaluation and Results for Lusophone Africa and Brazil (CLEAR-LAB), an implementing partner of GEI, recently interviewed Claudia on how participatory evaluation supports gender equality, human rights, and sustainable development.


In your presentations, such as the one you had during your gLOCAL webinar last year, you often say that participatory evaluations have a transformative impact. In what sense?


When we reflect on the transformative power of evaluations, we are referring to how they can and should always be a tool for decision-making focused on transformative processes. We understand this transformation as the opportunity for evaluation to catalyze the changes needed to address the most important development challenges, ensuring that these changes are sustainable.

This process, which seems simple, is not trivial and can occur in different ways, such as the design of a new policy or program based on evidence, a route adjustment within an implementing organization, parliamentary proposals, an institutional response to a citizen demand, among many other possibilities.

Participatory evaluation has exceptional potential to catalyze transformation processes, not only through the use of results as input for decision-making, but also through participatory processes that place the people involved at the center of reflection on what works and what does not work when we examine interventions that seek to improve people's lives.

Participatory evaluations promote capacity building, coordination, and empowerment of the people involved, their communities, and their organizations. Active and meaningful participation in evaluations fosters local ownership of development-oriented interventions and the strengthening of agents of change, who drive these transformation processes from civil society.


Typically, participatory evaluation focuses on the local community. Is it possible to carry out this type of evaluation in national projects?


It is true that due to the characteristics of a participatory evaluation, which requires the involvement of several actors in an increasing process of participation, most of these evaluations are carried out at the local or community level to align with scope of the interventions evaluated. However, it is possible to carry out participatory processes with the significant involvement of multiple actors at other levels, such as the national level.

This requires creating channels and spaces that allow people from more distant territories to actively participate, and this can be challenging due to the difficulty of organizing times and places for meetings. It's still an achievable goal and, in my view, it is worth the additional effort to promote spaces and channels that enable broader participation. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how virtual means can support this task effectively, as long as the need to ensure broad and diverse participation is taken into account, including those who may not have access to virtual spaces.

Based on my experience, it is possible and desirable to carry out participatory evaluations even of national policies, provided that there is a committed group of people willing to invest their time and effort in the process and that the responsible organization is prepared to carry out the work with the necessary time, costs, and commitments.
 

Claudia Olavarría is a Feminist Evaluation Consultant for the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) and an expert in the use of methods that integrate gender and human rights issues into participatory evaluation.
Claudia Olavarría is a Feminist Evaluation Consultant for the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) and an expert in the use of methods that integrate gender and human rights issues into participatory evaluation.


Could you tell us about some of your practical experiences with participatory evaluation?


One participatory evaluation process that had a profound impact on me was carried out with a rural community in the Maule region of Chile. In this context, I followed the implementation of an irrigation capacity-building project, which complemented the construction of large water infrastructure projects in a small community facing the effects of climate change.

Together, we designed and implemented a participatory evaluation of the process, which the community used to press for new works that were necessary at the time and that are now a reality. We worked with this community for about two years, both in monitoring the project and in carrying out the participatory evaluation.

This comprehensive process allowed us to build trust, promote collective learning, identify opportunities, and observe how the members of the community took ownership of the project and empowered themselves as agents of change within their own territory, establishing institutional alliances. In this context, the evaluation played a fundamental role as evidence to drive the necessary changes.


One of your areas of interest, in addition to your specialty, is the intersection between participatory evaluation, gender issues and human rights. How do these issues connect? How is this approach developed?


Participatory evaluation is closely linked to the use of gender and human rights approaches, and my recommendation is to always use these approaches together because they are coherent and aligned with one another. The relationship is quite simple. Participation is a human right enshrined in various human rights instruments. At the same time, it is a way to fulfill national commitments to protect human rights and to advance sustainable development without leaving anyone behind. Evaluation plays an important role here. The use of gender and human rights approaches implies raising the quality with which we evaluate, ensuring that gender and human rights issues are at the center of the analysis and communication of results, promoting transformative processes to reduce inequalities.

This means that the design of the evaluation, both in methodological terms and in its management processes, must always incorporate a gender and power relations perspective. And within the opportunities offered by an evaluation process, it must also seek to implement and recommend actions that promote empowerment and the reduction of inequalities.
 

(This interview was originally featured on the CLEAR-LAB website as part of an article series on participatory evaluation.)