"To be or not to be: how to be a transformative evaluator today"

PABLO RODRÍGUEZ BILELLA; SALINAS MULDER, SILVIA; AMARILES, FABIOLA; ZAVERI, SONAL

Praga

Conferencia; IDEAS International Conference; 2019

International Development Evaluation Association

The IDEAS association - International Association for Development Evaluation - is the largest professional organization worldwide with a focus on development issues. Prior to the conference days, a series of professional training workshops were developed, one of which was conducted by Pablo Rodríguez-Bilella and colleagues. This training instance was entitled ?To be or not to be: how to be a transformative evaluator today?. The workshop initially presented a theoretical framework on transformative evaluation, recovering different elements of this approach based on case studies from the Global South, mainly from Latin America. For this, the analysis of the evaluation stories recently published in Spanish and English in the book Leave Footprint played an important role. This exercise led to reflection on the factors that facilitate the evaluation to be really useful and contribute to social improvement, emphasizing the component of evaluations that have a positive impact on people´s lives. Together with this exercise, the facilitators presented a profile of competencies for evaluators that is relevant to their context and provides a gender transformative perspective. This is a comprehensive approach built in Latin America that amalgams technical, ethical and political issues in a set of competencies for evaluators, thus forming a profile of a transformative evaluator.