Role sharing between evaluators and stakeholders in practice

In the past three decades, program evaluation has sought to more fully engage stakeholders in the evaluative process. But little information has been gathered from stakeholders about how they share in evaluation tasks and whether role sharing leads to confusion or tensions between the evaluator and the stakeholders. This article reports findings from surveys and interviews with 20 evaluator-project director (lead stakeholder) pairs to explore how they share each other's roles in practice. In this study, sharing roles between evaluators and project directors generally was the norm among study participants but varied by the orientation of the evaluator (academic, program, or client). For some, there was tension and confusion in the role sharing of evaluators and stakeholders, but it was typically resolved early on in the cases where evaluators bring strong communication skills to the project. Where these skills were not present, the tensions did not resolve consistently.