The Program
Evaluation Standards in International Settings
Edited by Craig Russon
On February 18-20, 2000, the W. K. Kellogg
Foundation-funded residency meeting of regional and national
evaluation organizations
took place in Barbados, West Indies. Several organizations
were represented at the meeting as well as representatives
from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, The University of the
West Indies, the Caribbean Development Bank, and the United
Nations Capital Development Fund.
One of the issues around
which a lively debate ensued was The Program Evaluation
Standards (The Joint Committee on
Standards for Educational Evaluation, 1994). The Joint
Committee has always maintained that The Standards are uniquely
American
and may not be appropriate for use in other countries without
adaptation.
Several national evaluation organizations from
developing countries are anxious to undertake projects
to create standards
suitable for use in their own cultural contexts as a
means to guide practice in their countries.
Some of the evaluation
organizations from developed countries were less enthusiastic.
They view standards as a barrier
to innovation. They think that the word standards implies
imposition of best practices. (Developing countries
are not married to the term standards.) Furthermore, they
think that
no model can apply to all evaluations.
The participants
at the Barbados meeting postponed resolution of the issue
by saying that it was not appropriate
to
make a determination regarding this matter at the
international level. Rather, this decision should be made
by each
country.
It is in the context of this debate that
The Evaluation Center is pleased to print the seventeenth
volume
in the Occasional
Papers Series entitled, The Program Evaluation
Standards in International Settings. The volume contains
six
outstanding papers by Nicole Bacmann, Wolfgang
Beywl, Saviour Chircop, Soojung Jang, Charles Landert, Prachee
Mukherjee, Nick Smith, Sandy Taut and Thomas Widmer. |
