Participation and empowerment: insights for evaluation

Recent development theory and practice has placed the concepts of participation and empowerment at its core. Despite vast experience across the world in translating these theories into practice, the sharing and systematising of this experience still has far to go, especially in the area of evaluation. Evaluations carried out in traditional ways tend to come up with over-inflated claims while missing out on a wealth of evidence of real changes and achievements, many of which may not have been anticipated by the project managers and planners. This briefing is based on a detailed study of Reflect (an approach to adult learning and social change pioneered by ActionAid) projects in Uganda and Bangladesh published by DFID in 2003. The study explores in depth how participation and empowerment translate from theory and rhetoric into practice, and how the concepts are understood by the different people and groups involved in such projects. Of particular interest for development practitioners, planners and theorists are the insights into the complexity of evaluating projects with soft or intangible outcomes such as empowerment. This briefing pulls out some thoughts and conclusions from the study in order to further promote and provoke debate in this important area.