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- Convenor:
-
Fiorenzo Polito
(LAMA Social enterprise)
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- Format:
- Paper panel
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how evaluation and impact assessment can be reimagined in response to global crises, focusing on participatory, bottom-up approaches that empower communities, challenge power imbalances and promote collective action in the global North and South
Long Abstract:
Evaluation and impact assessment are crucial in development, revealing outcomes and pathways for social change. However, in an era of crisis - including the genocide in Gaza - the role of evaluation is under increasing scrutiny. Traditional top-down methods, often driven by donor priorities, positivist metrics and results-based management, can reduce social change to what can be counted, perpetuate power imbalances, marginalise community voices and limit opportunities for transformative change.
This panel explores how evaluation can be reimagined in response to uncertainty, and how evaluation practices can contribute to new forms of empowerment, justice and collective action in both the global North and South. While evaluation remains a tool for assessing the outcomes of interventions, its potential to support community-led transformation is under-exploited. Participatory and bottom-up approaches are therefore essential, challenging assumptions about assumed development and progress.
This panel invites papers focussing particularly, but not exclusively, on the following questions:
- Can evaluation practices, while ensuring accountability, become a site of resistance and opportunity for communities, and how?
- How can evaluation be a space for generating hope, collective agency, and alternative visions of the future?
- What are the constraints, inconsistencies, contradictions in democratising evaluation, and what steps can be taken to address them?
- What is the role and positionality of practitioners in ensuring accountability to communities and what are their responsibilities in this process?
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions at different stages of development from academics, practitioners and stakeholders reflecting and working on these issues.