Chapter 4: What Can Evaluation Do?: An Agenda for Evaluation in Service of an Equitable Society

We seek an evaluation practice with roots in practical philosophy that supports wayfinding by serving as a critical voice in social, political, and cultural environments indelibly marked by significant inequalities, power differentials, uncertainty, ambiguity, and interpretability. This is an environment in which we ask difficult questions about what kind of society we should have and what directions we should take and in which we are, at best, able to give only partial and temporary answers. Evaluation in such an environment is a kind of social conscience. It involves serious questioning of public direction. It is a risky undertaking in which we endeavor to find out not only whether what we are doing is a good thing to do but also what we do not know about what we are doing.