Doctoral Dissertation Research: Doing Evaluation: Knowledge Production in International Development

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

Project evaluation is a profession on the rise within and beyond the field of international development. The field has added more members in the last three years than in the previous thirty, reflecting wider shifts in how organizational decisions are made and justified. Charged with producing impartial accounts of project impact and worth, evaluators must reconcile different ideals of international development, and of evidence and proof. And yet evaluation as a profession has been little studied to date. This project will study of how evaluators shape development policy and practice. Results from the project will be useful for government and private funding agencies that require evaluations in their grants, the implementing organizations that commission evaluations of their work, and evaluators themselves as they further define their professional standards and practices. The project employs qualitative methods to shed light on the processes that shape evaluators' practice on the ground, and the wider consequences of their work. The project will conduct meeting ethnography and in-depth qualitative interviews with 70 working evaluators at and around the annual meetings of diverse professional evaluation associations, ranging from the regional to the international. This fieldwork will reveal how members of this relatively solitary profession create and contest the norms governing their growing field. The resulting analysis of evaluators as an emerging professional community gives vital institutional context to the larger study of how evaluators engage with other stakeholders as they carry out project evaluations. This multi-level analysis of professional evaluators will inform policy and practice in the development field, and for evaluation more broadly. The study contributes to a sociology of science that traces how social change happens through everyday processes of measurement, persuasion, and professionalization. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.