Evaluation Warriorship: Raising Shields to Redress the Influence of Capitalism on Program Evaluation

Abstract

Evaluation warriorship, as defined by ¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Inc., links the practice of evaluation learning, reflection, and storytelling to the evaluator’s social responsibility as a warrior for justice. Unchecked global capitalism has led to extreme economic and racial injustice, undermined democracies, and accelerated environmental catastrophe. This paper argues that more evaluation warriorship is needed to resist this particular system of oppression. It presents examples of how evaluators reproduce neoliberal logic (e.g., in landscape analyses and collective impact assessments), which ultimately undermines transformative change. Evaluator reflexivity questions are proposed to incite change within the field and to help individual evaluators and evaluation teams unpack neoliberalism in their own practice. Evaluation education should include instruction on the effects of neoliberalism and how it shapes both programs and evaluation approaches. Future research should expand the body of knowledge of how neoliberalism has impacted the field of evaluation, support the development of an anti-capitalist praxis, and offer new opportunities for evaluation resistance.