This paper explores how structured reflection on positionality can enhance evaluation practice through increased rigor, relevance, and transparency. Positionality refers to how evaluators’ sociopolitical contexts, identities, and worldviews fundamentally shape their work. Using a case example, we demonstrate the application of two complementary tools: the Social Identity Map and the Coin Model of Privilege. These tools moved us beyond simply listing identities toward a deeper understanding of how our social locations influence our evaluation work. Through individual and collective reflection, we identified team gaps, reaffirmed the critical importance of centering people with lived and living experience, and expanded our analysis to examine existing literature more critically. We feel that reflection on positionality should be embraced as an ongoing, context-specific practice, which strengthens the quality of our evaluation work and its impact.
Evaluation is widely recognized as value-laden, but less attention has been given to how values are structured across the evaluation process. This article develops the concept of value ordering to describe how evaluation organizes relationships among values and priorities through inclusion, exclusion, prioritization, weighting, sequencing, combination, adjudication, and visibility across institutional, methodological, analytical, and judgmental levels. The article examines how RCTs, realist evaluation, QCA, evidence synthesis, participatory approaches, and rubrics structure values in distinct ways. It then reinterprets QCA findings from Peace Corps small projects in Georgia, showing how multiple sufficient configurations can reflect different arrangements of program priorities. The contribution is a framework for analyzing how evaluation structures value and for understanding evaluators as value framers. The framework does not eliminate value judgment, but makes the structuring of values more visible, contestable, and open to scrutiny.
Evaluation design must be driven primarily by the core questions at hand and a deep understanding of local context. Embedding trust, relational accountability, and collaborative learning from a program’s inception is foundational and does not preclude the use of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) evaluation criteria. By integrating relational frameworks, deep cultural knowledge and ways of knowing with Western methodologies, evaluators can build more rigorous, relevant, and respectful evidence.
This study reconceptualizes evaluation capacity as a noncompensatory system in which specific dimensions function as binding constraints, addressing the puzzle that countries with similar formal capacity scores produce sharply divergent levels of evaluation use. Applying Necessary Condition Analysis to 15 national evaluation systems across the Middle East and North Africa, the analysis identifies necessary conditions for evaluation use, tests for noncompensatory dynamics, and examines how bottleneck configurations vary across national contexts. Four dimensions emerge as strong necessary conditions: Professionalization, Evaluation Education, Organizational Embedding, and Institutionalization. Communication and social system variables show weak, nonsignificant necessity. Countries with formal institutional frameworks but limited professional capacity (Bahrain, Tunisia) achieve uniformly low use, while countries with professional capacity but minimal institutionalization (Lebanon) achieve substantially higher use. The article introduces Necessary Condition Analysis to evaluation research and positions it alongside regression and Qualitative Comparative Analysis as a complementary diagnostic tool, with implications for capacity development sequencing.
Evaluators can better communicate and work with groups, individuals, and communities when operational definitions exist as a source of providing a shared understanding of concepts, particularly complicated dynamics within intersectionality theories. This article investigates privileged positionalities and how these identities impact evaluation work, as well as how and in what ways marginalized identities coexist with privileged layers of identity. Within this investigation, the construction and personal example of the author's “positionality wheel” allows for the identification of contextual interactions, hidden and relatively unobservable identities, and more directly observable layers. This breakdown of identity and position allows for a humanistic conversation about where these interactions fit as a part of interpersonal communication. The article also allows for reflection and mindfulness, so evaluation work can cater to a large array of experiences and communicate the strengths and limitations of interactions between privileged and marginalized identities.
Positionality statements challenge the notion of objectivity in evaluation, recognizing that evaluators are shaped by their identities and experiences. From their distinct lived experiences and intersecting identities, the authors realized that their positionality is malleable and changes over time. In this manuscript, three emerging evaluators share how positionality and social location shape their evaluation practices and the decisions that they make in their work. The authors offer reflections about how engagement with positionality statements in their own practice falls along a continuum of awareness, experimentation, and integration. The proposed continuum ranges from evaluators who have yet to integrate positionality into their deliverables to evaluators who have fully incorporated positionality into their professional practice. Intentional self-reflection and self-awareness is present at every stage of the continuum. We conclude by inviting evaluators to critically examine how they use positionality as a tool to advance more just evaluation practices.
Entanglements of power and individual and collective commitments remain persistent issues for evaluation's potential impact. Dominant approaches have long operated hegemonically, privileging singular ways of knowing. Thus, concentrating epistemic authority in ways that silence community knowledge traditions and reproduce the very inequities evaluation is charged with examining. The need to confront internalized oppression and reevaluate power dynamics to shift them is a persistent blockage in the potential impact of evaluation. Though the shortcomings of positionality statements as performative gestures have received scholarly attention, the material conditions that prevent evaluators from enacting positionality in practice, and what they might do differently, remain underexplored. In this article, I call for culturally responsive and community-engaged approaches that resist extractive and constricting traditions. To operationalize this call, I offer a stage-specific framework that situates positionality as praxis across the stages of evaluation, providing evaluators with concrete and actionable guidance for enacting relational accountability at every phase of their work. When evaluators move beyond identity statements toward sustained, community-accountable praxis, positionality becomes a tool for dismantling the very systems of power that evaluation has too often upheld.
