Paper short abstract:

In the development world, advocacy plays an increasingly important role while evaluating its effectiveness is complicated. This paper illustrates the negotiated nature of evaluating advocacy effectiveness, questioning the objective nature of evaluation.

Paper long abstract:

In the development world, advocacy plays an increasingly important role while evaluating its effectiveness is complicated. Reflecting on a major advocacy evaluation from 2012-2015 by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which the authors were evaluators, evaluation is inherently a political space where negotiation thrives as all stakeholders manoeuvre internal and external pressures around results and its assessment. Meanwhile operating within political and resource constraints. In assessing advocacy effectiveness, the cause and effect relation is unclear and change is mostly discovered in interaction with advocates and targets, based on experiences and interpretations. This makes evaluating advocacy effectiveness a dynamic process characterized by social interactions and political agendas and interests rather than an objective and rational process whereby the evaluator is merely instrumental to assess results. Therefore, it is necessary to look into negotiations as shaping the meaning of effectiveness. In this paper we question the idea of evaluation as objective and rational process and aim to answer the questions: what is being negotiated in the evaluation process and what does this mean for the evaluation process and quality? We will answer these questions by illustrating the negotiations around identifying outcomes, measuring outcomes and presenting outcomes as part of our advocacy evaluation and discuss its implications for the evaluation outcome.