Short Abstract

What foundations are required to foster a culture where community stakeholders collaborate together to do and use realist evaluation to support collective learning, inform local action, and evidence the contributions of their efforts to fulfill external accountability requirements.

Description

Background: Research on building evaluation capacity in community settings remains limited. Existing approaches often focus on developing individual or organisational knowledge, skills and processes within already conducive contexts. Less is known about how to create the relational, social, and infrastructural foundations that motivate and enable networks of community stakeholders to collaborate in doing and using evaluation—and to embed it as a valued, collective practice. This paper draws on PhD research to identify what works in creating the conditions for community stakeholders to collaborate in doing and using realist evaluation and how these conditions foster a facilitative culture for evaluation and learning.

Methods: Nineteen community stakeholders—including community residents, volunteers, funded community roles, local authority officers, parish councillors, and representatives from voluntary and faith-based organisations—participated in Q-methodology which included a post-sort realist interview. Participants ranked 40 statements on a forced distribution grid to reflect what facilitated or hindered their participation in doing and using realist evaluation. Interviews explored the reasoning behind how and why statements were positioned in relation to each other. Factors (shared viewpoints between community stakeholders) were identified using PQMethod and Principal Component Analysis to reveal the distinct shared community stakeholder perspectives.

Findings: Four shared viewpoints were revealed, highlighting what worked in facilitating them to collaborate in doing realist evaluation and using the findings to happen. The findings informed a refined Framework for Facilitating Realist Evaluation and Learning within Community Settings. This presentation paper focuses on the first domain of the framework—Establish the Foundations for Collaboration to Evaluate and Learn—which comprises four key conceptual areas:

1. Establish and understand the motivations for collaboration: Recognising and aligning individual and collective motivations to collaborate in evaluation.

2. Establish and understand the community and what is being evaluated: Taking time to build relationships, understand the local context, and connect evaluation to community priorities.

3. Support community stakeholders to understand the evaluation and/or its benefits: Enabling stakeholders to see the personal and collective value of participating in evaluation for them and the community.

4. Identify existing assets and resources for evaluation and learning: Leveraging local leadership, relationships, and infrastructures to support collaboration and learning.

Contribution: The presentation paper will explore, for each of the four groups of community stakeholders, how and why the conditions worked in facilitating collaboration in doing and using realist evaluation, and the benefits that occurred for them as a result. The resulting framework provides evaluators and funders with practical guidance on how to create the conditions that enable realist evaluation and learning to take root within communities. It emphasises the importance of focusing on the relational, social, and infrastructural foundations that allow networks of community stakeholders to collaborate purposefully. By doing so, the framework supports thinking on how to develop a facilitative culture for evaluation and learning that strengthens community ownership, enhances collective capacity, and promotes the effective use of evidence for learning, action, and fulfilling accountability requirements.