Empowerment Evaluation: The Basics and the Evaluator’s Role

In our previous blog post, we began a brief introduction to the theories of evaluation. We touched on some of the key theories used today: utilization-focused, developmental, empowerment, and participatory evaluation.  In this post, we’d like to delve a little deeper into the concepts and background of empowerment evaluation.

As a quick recap, empowerment evaluation is a type of evaluation where the evaluator takes on a coaching role and provides the client with greater control over the evaluation. The evaluator gives the client the tools and abilities to meet and evaluate the program goals, while the evaluator helps keep the evaluation process on track by addressing the client’s needs.

Empowerment evaluation originated in the 1990s and stemmed from the need for a more iterative approach to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a program to improve it. David Fetterman, one of the pioneers of empowerment evaluation, stresses that empowerment evaluation empowers clients by providing them with the skills to evaluate their own program(s).  When clients can evaluate their program(s) (with the guidance of an evaluator), evaluation becomes part of the program planning and management process.

Empowerment evaluation aims to ensure that the program will succeed by identifying approaches that will increase the program’s success. This is one key difference from other theories of evaluation that assess program outcomes and success without influencing/altering the program in any way. 

 Next we’ll talk about how empowerment evaluation works in practice. Stay tuned.

Sources:

               Patton, M. Q. (2005). Toward distinguishing empowerment evaluation and placing it into a larger context: Take two. American Journal of Evaluation, 26(3), 408-414. doi: 10.1177/1098214005277353

               Sherriff, B., & Porter, S. (n.d.). An introduction to empowerment evaluation: Teaching materials. Retrieved from website: http://www.mrc.ac.za/crime/evaluation.pdf