ABSTRACT
Considerable front-end costs are associated with participatory development strategies, but the downstream benefits are significant and usually outweigh the costs considerably. Development agencies must assess the costs and benefits of participatory evaluation (PE), a form of participatory development. PE has attracted interest among development practitioners worldwide. The transformative tradition of PE seeks to promote the democratization of knowledge and social change in favour of the poor and marginalized in society, while the pragmatic tradition seeks to increase the stakeholders' commitment to using evaluation and improving interventions. Establishing a network of centres of excellence in PE throughout the developing world could organize and aggregate local specialists, set common professional standards, promote best practices, and exchange experience and technologies. The lessons learned from numerous PEs worldwide demonstrate that citizens' knowledge is much more valuable in helping the evaluation process produce results than the knowledge of other project stakeholders.
