The Challenges of Diversity in Evaluation

As program evaluation has developed over the last twenty years into a viable profession, its central challenge has become to define what it means to be an evaluator. This debate is fueled less by traditional divisions between academic and service-related professionals, or disagreements over methodologies, than by sharply different visions of the evaluator's moral and political role, derived from the profession's historic roots in principles of social justice and concern for individual rights.