Chapter 10: People in Change

Evaluation does not take place in a moral vacuum. Methodology cannot serve to curtain off the existential dilemmas we all face on a daily basis. When innovators enter into a programme they do not suspend the moral and emotional forces which play on their lives, and if the evaluator is not, at the very least, aware of this backdrop she is merely creating yet another social fiction. Evaluators are (should be) theorists of change, and it is the response to change at the individual level that determines so much of programme experience. Hence the contribution of this chapter.

Deep in the background of any social programme lies the continuing struggle to define and align with European Humanism, and this, too, implicates evaluation in a direct way. The Renaissance (southern Europe) and Reformation (northern Europe) paved the way for individualism and for personal responsibility for one’s identity, spirituality and moral career – free from unaccountable, clerical authority. One of the costs of individual freedom was the necessity for the individual to confront mortality and failure. The emergence of social institutions, to some extent, relieved us of these responsibilities, and throughout the 20th Century we came to look at social institutions – from Parliament to School, from Ministry to police station – as protectors of humanist ideals, human rights and citizen welfare. Our job as evaluators usually involves scrutiny of social institutions and so, in something more than an indirect way, knowingly or not, we document humanist endeavour. We had better know the people we are evaluating.