Chapter 10: Evaluation for a Caring Society: Toward New Imaginaries

This volume highlights responsive, participatory, and democratic approaches to evaluation in the context of care. We aimed to learn how care can enrich evaluators’ work to foster a caring society. Care regards society as the complex, relational engagement of people who do everything to maintain and repair their life-sustaining webs so that they can live their lives as well as possible (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). While searching for more specific definitions, scholars in care ethics and care theory still discuss what care is: a skill or a virtue, a practice or a relational ontology. In our own work, we see care as a moral-political and creative practice of mutual learning that constitutes the ongoing unfolding and becoming of interdependent people who are part of nested relationships (Kittay, 1999; Leget, van Nistelrooij, & Visse, 2017; Visse, Abma, & Widdershoven, 2015).