Empowerment Evaluation Principles in Practice

What principles should guide an empowerment evaluation? And how can these principles actually be put into practice? One of the primary tasks in an empowerment evaluation (EE) is to increase the capacity of program stakeholders to plan, implement, and evaluate their own programs. This book presents the most current formulation of the 10 principles of EE and provides professionals and students with the tools to put these principles into practice. Through case studies of diverse evaluation projects--including community health foundation initiatives, school district programs, and a $15 million corporate program aimed at bridging the digital divide--the founder and leading proponents of EE clarify key concepts and discuss important lessons learned. Coverage includes how to balance program improvement efforts with accountability requirements; how EE can be used to guide standards-based work; how to use EE in a learning organization; the differences among empowerment, collaborative, and participatory evaluation; and much more.

Negotiated Learning: Collaborative Monitoring for Forest Resource Management

Negotiated Learning is edited by Irene Guijt and draws on the first-hand experiences of researchers and development professionals in eleven countries in Africa, Asia, and South America to critically examine how monitoring can be an effective tool in participatory resource management. Collective monitoring shifts the emphasis of development and conservation professionals from externally defined programs to a locally relevant process. It focuses on community participation in the selection of the indicators to be monitored as well as in the learning and application of knowledge from the data that are collected. As with other aspects of collaborative management, collaborative monitoring emphasizes building local capacity.

The cases in Negotiated Learning highlight best practices but stress that collaborative monitoring is a relatively new area of theory and practice. The cases focus on four themes: the challenge of data-driven monitoring in forest systems that supply multiple products and serve diverse functions and stakeholders; the importance of building upon existing dialogue and learning systems; the need to better understand social and political differences among local users and other stakeholders; and the need to ensure the continuing adaptiveness of monitoring systems. This book is a co-publication with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).