Democratic Evaluation

Abstract

Citizens, due to a lack of participation in public decision-making, often exercise ‘counterpower’ when a decision is taken, which can result in delaying or abandoning public projects. This could have been prevented if power and counterpower had negotiated during the decision-making process. Democratic Evaluation brings such a simultaneous exercise of power and counterpower to public decision-making. The evaluation method that we are proposing must enable a democratic type of evaluation to be made operational. Our aim is to demonstrate that the implementation of Democratic Evaluation is only conceivable when Empowerment Evaluation, Participatory Evaluation and Multicriteria Evaluation are associated and considered as stages in the same evaluation process. This constitutes what we call a ‘ Model for the Operationalization of Democratic Evaluation’ (MODE).