Clear Horizon has a particular approach to evaluation, with an emphasis on the participation of program staff and other stakeholders in the process of evaluation. The inclusion of participatory processes in evaluations has a number of benefits:

Building the capacity of those we work with

Clear Horizon is committed to building capacity in monitoring and evaluation. Program staff and stakeholders gain an exceptional amount of learning from their involvement in evaluation processes. In a recent evaluation Clear Horizon conducted in the North-East of Victoria, 18 program staff volunteered to conduct interviews and report the findings of these interviews back to the evaluation team. This experience, and the lessons gleaned from these interviews, was felt to be so beneficial by senior managers, that they recommended that staff conduct interviews every year.

Fostering ownership of the evaluation

We strongly believe in harnessing the expert knowledge and values of stakeholders and providing them with collective forums to make sense of evaluation findings themselves. In this way, knowledge products are directly relevant to the project context while ownership is fostered amongst stakeholders in relation to existing and successive projects. A key way to achieve this dual outcome is through participation. Key stakeholders are invited to participate in an ‘Evaluation Summit’ to analyse the data and surface the key success factors and develop recommendations for future direction.

Encouraging ‘use’ of evaluation information

Participation in the process of developing recommendations (which occurs at the Evaluation Summit) means that the recommendations are far more likely to be accepted and used. A major failing of evaluation (which is recognised internationally) is that evaluation studies frequently fail to influence the way a program or project is delivered. Clear Horizon believes in using evaluation for program improvement and takes this aspect of the evaluation very seriously. Consequently, by involving program staff in developing recommendations, Clear Horizon’s work tends to have a higher level of influence on organisations and stakeholders; for example, the recommendations from our recent evaluation of the Victorian Biodiversity Strategy directly lead into a new state Government White Paper.