DEALING WITH POWER ISSUES IN EVALUATION, PERSPECTIVES FROM LATIN AMERICA: OUR SESSION AT THE AEA CONFERENCE

[Silvia Salinas Mulder]

Power is a key though tricky issue in evaluations, which becomes even trickier and sometimes gets hidden in multicultural complex contexts in Latin America.  On one hand, social change implies changing unequal power relations, and on the other, power relations are inevitably present in all interactions during the evaluation process.

With the goal to promote greater South-North dialogue on evaluations, and based on our professional evaluation experiences in countries like Bolivia and Guatemala, last Saturday we shared our reflections, lessons and proposals on dealing with power issues in evaluation at the 2015 Conference of the American Evaluation Conference in Chicago.   

We proposed evaluators to “step back and step down” and, at the same time, become activists of social change.  We also proposed a “Power Blindness Wheel”, as a model that  identifies niches where power may “hide” during evaluations; we shared tips to disentangle power relations in the process. We finally invited the audience to “take off our own lenses in order to see new things”.

We are pleased to share our presentations with the EvalGender+ community, and eager to receive your comments and feedback!

Silvia Salinas & Fabiola Amariles

AEA presentation Silvia Salinas

AEA presentation Fabiola Amariles

[Rukmini Panda]

Thanks for sharing your ppt which is very useful.