Radical rerouting: New roads for advocacy evaluation

Abstract

This article discusses the evolution of evaluation of advocacy and its alignment with different parties’ interests in rigor, participation, and usefulness. We then explore responses to our paper, No Royal Road: Finding and Following the Natural Pathways of Advocacy Evaluation, which sought to reframe advocacy evaluation concepts and analytic frames in ways that take into account the complex contexts in which advocacy takes place. We suggest that a narrow conception of power is acting as a fundamental barrier to evaluation approaches that enable and support transformative advocacy. The article concludes with an argument to fully embrace complexity and power issues, noting that this points to radically different implications for future evaluation practices. This argument is, in many ways, anti‐paradigmatic to the current evaluation field, but it draws on a thread of thinking going back to the pioneers in the field.