Context Matters: Evaluation in the 21st Century
1.6 Evaluation takes place in a political context
The political aspects of evaluation have been the subject of significant debate in the evaluation field. Carol Weiss offers a comprehensive reflection on the many political facets of evaluation projects.
Evaluation is a rational enterprise. It examines the effects of policies and programs on their targets—whether individuals, groups, institutions, or communities—in terms of the goals they are meant to achieve. By objective and systematic methods, evaluation research assesses the extent to which goals are realized and looks at the factors that are associated with successful or unsuccessful outcomes. The assumption is that by providing “the facts,” evaluation assists decision-makers to make wise choices among future courses of action. Careful and unbiased data on the consequences of programs should improve decision-making.
But evaluation is a rational enterprise that takes place in a political context. Political considerations intrude in three major ways, and the evaluator who fails to recognize their presence is in for a series of shocks and frustrations:
First, the policies and programs with which evaluation deals are the creatures of political decisions. They were proposed, defined, debated, enacted, and funded through political processes, and in implementation they remain subject to pressures—both supportive and hostile—that arise out of the play of politics.
Second, because evaluation is undertaken in order to feed into decision-making, its reports enter the political arena. There evaluative evidence of program outcomes has to compete for attention with other factors that carry weight in the political process.
Third, and perhaps least recognized, evaluation itself has a political stance. By its very nature, it makes implicit political statements about such issues as the problematic nature of some programs and the unchallengeability of others, the legitimacy of program goals and program strategies, the utility of strategies of incremental reform, and even the appropriate role of the social scientists in policy and program formation.
Knowing that political constraints and resistances exist is not a reason for abandoning evaluation research; rather it is a precondition for usable evaluation research. Only when the evaluator has insight into the interests and motivations of other actors in the system, into the roles that he himself is consciously or inadvertently playing, the obstacles and opportunities that impinge upon the evaluative effort, and the limitations and possibilities for putting the results of evaluation to work—only with sensitivity to the politics of evaluation research—can the evaluator be as creative and strategically useful as he should be. (as cited in Weiss, 1973/1993, pp. 93-94)
