Evaluators have tried to help. In the early days, they created “evaluability assessment”, a method for assessing whether the interventions to be evaluated met the conditions required to put together an evaluation, such as clear goals, measures of success, and maps of how their activities would lead to these outcomes. When policy makers and program designers struggled to meet these conditions, evaluators rolled up their sleeves and got into the business of intervention design. Their inventions include logic models, results chains, change pathways, theories of change and – more recently – hypotheses of change.
While each of these tools are useful in specific situations, they have not been able to accommodate a simple yet critical reality that the thinking and action of many would-be change makers are guided by principles rather than logic models. These include:
Yet, for all their power and influence, principles are often implicit. They live in the shadows of social innovation.
In his latest book, Principles-Focused Evaluation: A Guide, Michael Quinn Patton pulls the principles-focused approach out of the shadows and crafts a compelling and coherent approach for integrating them into evaluation practice. The book is organized into five sections:
As in all his previous books, Patton illustrates his ideas and practices with an impressive number and variety of anecdotes, vignettes and stories. These focus on different domains (e.g., poverty, homelessness, agriculture, etc.) and operate on different scales (e.g., organizational programs to international). All of them are informative and demonstrate the value of principles-focused evaluation in a wide range of contexts. The Vibrant Communities case study, for example, will be of interest for people interested in poverty reduction, country-wide initiatives, and Canadian examples.
With principles-focused evaluation, Patton has (once again) made a significant contribution to the field of evaluation, as well as to the theory and practice of social innovation. Principles-focused evaluation is a game-changer for social innovators, evaluators, policy makers and funders who are interested in making – and evaluating – progress on the tough economic, social and environmental challenges of our time.
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