An important part of the approach in the CO3 project is that of Participatory Action Research to develop community interventions that promote collaboration and commoning to wider social groups in the city. The participatory research process enables researchers to step back cognitively from familiar routines, forms of interaction, and power relationships to fundamentally question and rethink established interpretations of situations and strategies (Bergold & Thomas 2012). In this realm, our evaluation framework is important to dispute the way we used to evaluate the sustainability and to acknowledge impact in social service provision if we want to create a sense of ownership and commoning for the designed services among stakeholders and citizens.
Consequently, we will incorporate elements of the Participatory Evaluation approach to achieve greater involvement of the stakeholders in the evaluation process. Participatory evaluation is an evaluation strategy which implies that, when doing an evaluation, researchers, facilitators, or professional evaluators collaborate in some way with individuals, groups, or communities who have a decided stake in the program, development project, or other entity being evaluated (Cousins, Whitmore – 1998)
With this in mind, we will engage with all stakeholders of the co-design process:
- Citizens
- Public
- Commoners
- Local businesses
The intention of such an expansion on the conception of evaluators is to empower and create awareness to all stakeholders involved in designing and implementing the service and also to the people who are affected by this implementation. In particular, this increase in stakeholders participation in the evaluation process will lead: a. to increase the utilization of evaluation results, b. to represent the values and concerns of the multiple groups involved, c. to promote the empowerment of disenfranchised stakeholder groups previously left out of the process (Papineau & Kiely 1996).
What we want to achieve is understand what it is important for the stakeholder to evaluate. Our metrics will have to incorporate their interests and views. We also aim to explore how voices unheard can have a more significant role in this process, for example, beneficiaries of social services that are rarely asked on how they evaluate the service provided. We are going to follow the approach of Transformative Participatory Evaluation that has as its foundation principles emancipation and social justice. It seeks to empower members of community groups who are less powerful than or are otherwise oppressed by dominating groups. (Cousins, Whitmore – 1998)
To achieve this, we are going to have discussions with local pilots and stakeholders and try to map important metrics for the underrepresented stakeholders. The co-design process has already provided us with valuable insights into this aspect, and we will combine these insights with elements from the following table of participatory evaluation approaches.
Sources:
- Bergold, J. & Thomas, S. (2012) Participatory Research Methods: A Methodological Approach in Motion. Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, Vol. 37 No. 4 (142),
- Cousins, J. B., & Whitmore, E. (1998). Framing participatory evaluation. New directions for evaluation, 1998(80), 5-23.
- Papineau, D. & Kiely, M. (1996) Participatory Evaluation in a Community Organization: Fostering Stakeholder Empowerment and Utilization. Evaluation and Program Planning, Vol. 19 No.1, pp 79-93