We revisit and clarify evaluation approaches and practices that aim for social justice. Rooted in the work of contemporary philosophers, Nancy Fraser and Nicholas Wolterstorff, we argue that justice involves both a right order in society and natural rights for all human beings. We situate key evaluation approaches that have explicitly addressed justice—deliberative democratic evaluation, transformative evaluation, culturally responsive evaluation, and indigenous evaluation—in relation to these two notions of justice. Then, we provide seven case examples from published literature and one case from our practice to illustrate justice as natural rights and right order, demonstrating what evaluation practice looks like when rooted in both notions of social justice. We hope to reinvigorate attention and commitments to values engagement regarding justice in evaluation approaches and practices.
Kallemeyn et al. (Thu,) studied this question.