Section 3: How does Democracy, Human Rights and Governance relate to the work of VOPEs?

To address the relation between Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG) and VOPEs, we recommend to use a lens that will understand evaluation field as a system.

For this we suggest to you to pay attention to:

• relationships
• multiple perspectives 
• boundaries

For example, the Eval Agenda 2020 -developed by EvalPartners (available here), structures its strategies  to strengthen  evaluation in the following dimensions:

We recommend you to use these dimensiones to approach the work of the VOPE.

There are two main paths we recommend VOPEs to consider on how their work relates to DRG: 1) Promoting DRG through Evaluation and 2) Promoting DRG Evaluation.

1) Promoting Democracy, Human Rights and Governance through Evaluation

The goal of this type of work relates to VOPEs that are contributing to strengthening democratic governance and the exercise of human rights by increasing and improving evaluation practice.

The main strategy to achieve this goal is to do advocacy for the institutionalization of evaluation in the context in which the VOPEs work. This strategy is based on the following premise: “More Evaluation for more Democratic Governance”.

The main contribution that VOPES can make in this direction are:

• Bringing awareness of the contribution that increasing the practice of evaluation can make to the strengthening of democratic governance.
• Advocating for the strengthening of evaluation practice and its contribution to social justice, equity, inclusion and in general the exercise of human rights.

It is important to highlight that the contribution that evaluation can make to the exercise of human rights is not something that happens as a “natural” consequence of an evaluation process. On the contrary, it is a political and technical definition that requires the commitment of the evaluation team, of evaluation commissioners, and of other actors involved in the process.

The advocacy for evaluation strategy is closely related to the main purpose of the work of VOPEs worldwide. This strategy will mainly be situated in an Institutional Capacity Development, Enabling Environment dimension.

2) Promoting Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Evaluation

The goal of this type of work is to strengthen the practice of evaluating initiatives related to Democracy, Human rights and/or Governance issues.

There are four main contributions that VOPEs can make in this direction:

• Facilitate training of evaluators, evaluation commissioners and other interested technicians in DRG Evaluation tools.
• Provide a space to share experiences on DRG evaluation. This will facilitate exposure to this type of evaluation, stimulate the debate about its relevance, share lessons learned and motivate its development.
• Build partnerships to promote the demand of DRG evaluation in diverse sectors and contexts.
• Motivate evaluators to work closely with democracy and rights practitioners and advocates for mutual exchange: to enable evaluators learning about effective advocacy from practitioners, and advocates learning more about evidence, evaluation and impactful interventions from VOPEs.

The contributions listed above are situated in an Individual Capacity Development, Enabling Environment and interaction dimension.