A radical arc in systematically documenting political context in advocacy evaluation

Abstract

Ten major global forces are fixed within the current political context: racial capitalism, neo‐slavery, neoliberalism, white supremacy, neofascism, neocolonialism, neo‐feudalism, imperialism, corporatism, and radical imagination. These forces have been underexamined in the current advocacy evaluation practice, creating missed opportunities for evaluation as a tool for liberation. Attending to these forces and the logics underpinning them should be a new arc within the advocacy evaluation field. Expanded evaluator skills, tools, and methodologies are needed to fully assess advocacy theories of change, campaign activities, and their results in context vis‐à‐vis these 10 global forces. Several regressive field‐level processes inhibiting radical portrayals of the political context and the creation and use of liberatory metrics in advocacy evaluation are discussed.

Between Funding Requirements and Community Priorities: Centro Hispano of Dane County’s Transformative Approach to Program Evaluation

“…Only recently have evaluation scholars such as Robinson (2021aRobinson ( , 2021b started to unpack how neoliberalism has impacted the field, advocating for the development of an anti-capitalist praxis in evaluation, and offering new opportunities for critical systematic reflection. Neoliberalism is "a shorthand for a range of phenomena in the modern era" (Hardin, 2014, as cited in Robinson, 2021a 2), and the term's definition is surrounded by much debate, contestation, and variation (Peck, 2013;Harvey, 2007;Robinson, 2021a).…”

“…Approaches focused on cultural context and identity, such as culturally responsive evaluation (Symonette, 2005;Hood et al, 2015) and Indigenous evaluation (e.g., Cram et al, 2018;Chilisa et al, 2016;Waapalaneexkweew (Bowman) & Dodge-Francis, 2018;Cajete, 2000;Kovach, 2010) have expanded evaluation frameworks and methods toward acknowledging the importance of positionality and incorporating multiple ways of being and knowing. Yet only recently have evaluators begun to unpack the way neoliberal assumptions⎯free-market logics applied to the social sector⎯have been normalized and universalized in and through evaluation (Robinson, 2021a;2021b). This lens offers a new path to approaching the role of evaluation in maintaining systemic injustices that reach beyond questions of process, participation, culture, or identity.…”