Evaluating and improving policy and practice

This chapter looks at the eighth competency area for community development practice, how to evaluate in order to improve policy and practice. Project and program evaluation in community development is vital to learning, to knowing where the project is going, to making decisions about work planning and resource allocation, and as the basis for reporting back on progress to the community, to your employing agency and to other key stakeholders, such as funders. In community development practice, evaluation is not something just undertaken by the professional practitioner or some outside research consultant. Community development practice lays great emphasis upon participative action research. In other words, in engaging and supporting the engagement of the community in the project/program evaluation process. Action research also highlights that evaluation is not an exercise done at the end of the project, but periodically during it. In other words, it is undertaken to inform and shape progress, as well as at the completion of the project. This chapter looks at participatory action research in more detail and, by way of five case studies at how evaluation has been used to improve policy and practice