Stakeholder Involvement

Stakeholder involvement refers to the participation of stakeholders in one or more components of the evaluation process. Involvement implies a role beyond providing information or responding to data-gathering instruments. Stakeholders who are involved in an evaluation process contribute to important decisions regarding evaluation planning, implementation, and use.

There are two primary rationales for stakeholder involvement in evaluation: (a) to enhance the usefulness of the evaluation results, process, or both and (b) to advance values related to equity, empowerment, and social change within the evaluation context. The utilization rationale arose during the 1970s in the United States from within the field of evaluation itself, largely in response to the disappointing lack of influence observed for the previous 1960s evaluations of the ambitious innovations of the Great Society era. These early evaluations were conducted by applied social scientists who relied on the experimentation methods they knew at the time. However, as is well recounted in the annals of evaluation history, the logic and precision of experimentation in social science was a poor fit to the disordered and dynamic character of public policies and programs. The results of these early evaluations were neither methodologically defensible nor very useful to decision makers or any other stakeholders. Empirical studies and conceptual theorizing about how to make evaluation more useful led to the core idea of stakeholder involvement, among several other utilization-oriented practices. If key stakeholders are involved in determining the course of an evaluation, goes the reasoning, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership in the process and thereby more likely to find the evaluation useful and to actually use the results and recommendations.

A values-driven rationale for stakeholder involvement was brought into the U.S. evaluation community from external traditions of participatory and participatory action research, particularly as practiced in less developed countries around the world. This rationale was consonant with the growing recognition, again during the 1970s in the United States, that evaluation is an inherently politicized and value-laden enterprise. Given the value inherency of evaluation, goes this reasoning, the kinds of values that can be most defensibly promoted in evaluation are those related to equity, justice, and empowerment. A critical vehicle for advancing such values in evaluation is active stakeholder participation.

The nature and form of stakeholder involvement in evaluation varies with its rationale. Use-oriented genres focus on securing the participation of a few key stakeholders with a stated interest in the evaluation. These stakeholders, characteristically on-site program administrators and staff, are likely to contribute to initial decisions about evaluation purposes and priority questions and to later decisions about action implications of the evaluation findings. In values-based genres, the emphasis is on securing the participation of a diverse range of stakeholders, including especially those with least power in the context; notably, intended program beneficiaries. This diverse “team” is likely to have decision authority in the evaluation process from start to finish, and there will be roles as data gatherers and analysts for its members. In values-based genres, the emphasis is often as much on the empowerment benefits of participation itself as on the value dimensions of the results.

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