A Transformative Paradigm.
More recently, a new paradigm for evaluation has emerged—the transformative paradigm. It emerged initially, and is still most pow- erful, in international development work and in the developing world, though the paradigm is gaining proponents in the United States and Western countries. Like constructivism and postpositivism, this paradigm emerged in response to the stric- tures of positivism, but also developed in response to concerns in developing countries that research and evaluation often failed to address critical political and social problems. Like the constructivist paradigm, the transformative paradigm acknowledges multiple realities and the need for evaluation to capture those real- ities. However, the emphasis of the transformative paradigm is on the political, social, and economic factors that form those realities. The transformative paradigm is less concerned with methodological choices and more concerned with the nature of the problems that evaluation addresses and how stakeholders are involved in the evaluation. Transformative evaluations are concerned with empowering groups that have less power in society. These can include poor people, ethnic or racial minorities, women, and people with disabilities (Mertens, 1999). The focus of the evaluation is on helping these groups construct their own knowledge and
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empowering them by having them play a central role in the evaluation (Hall, 1992; Freire, 1970, 1982). The evaluator serves as a facilitator to the decisions made by the stakeholders about the evaluation in order to change power struc- tures and knowledge. Some view transformative evaluation as a new paradigm. Others view it as an approach. We will cover this type of evaluation as an approach more extensively in Chapter 8.