Significance of Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation (VOPES) for the Dissemination and Professionalization of Evaluation

Abstract

Along with an increased global awareness of evaluation as a key tool for supporting new and improved public policies, there are important concerns around its practice and legitimacy. First, there is a widespread perception that there are too many poor quality evaluations, a point strongly linked with issues of competencies, that is, ensuring that those who do undertake evaluation work are qualified to do so. Second, there is the displacement of evaluation by quality assurance and performance management systems and the encroachment of other occupational undertakings into evaluation territory (business analysts, data and impact analysts). Third, there is a lack of well-established credentials and standards for those who claim to be an evaluator.These have been some of the key topics that have recurrently giving rise to debates on professionalization. These are understood as a relevant and pertinent pathway towards overcoming these problems by giving evaluation a greater status, recognition and ultimately market share. A different position ? an agnostic one ? while recognising the seriousness of the above problems, there are doubts whether professionalization is the journey which should now be followed as a field.In this way, the topic of professionalization has emerged as one of the fundamental issues of the evaluation trans-discipline, one of these recurring themes, problems, and issues that periodically resurface in new forms to demand our attention. In this particular case, professionalization is one closely linked with the collective of evaluators, that is, the societies, associations and networks of evaluators, which have been more recently identified as VOPEs ? Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation ?. It has been within them (and sometimes between them) that professionalization has been discussed, argued, and constructed. The Global Evaluation Agenda , an evaluation vision for 2020 validated through an elaborate international consultation process involving VOPEs and individual evaluators, has also featured professionalization as a priority for the global community. At the same time, we probably are now at a moment when the discussion around professionalization is being dealt with less effervescence than years ago, making it easier to have a constructive dialogue about it. Colleagues that were sceptics in the past about professionalising evaluation as a good direction to go in, are open now to explore this path, and some important efforts are already being made in order to give a deeper understanding of the theoretical and conceptual issues involved in professionalization . This article introduces briefly some of the characteristics of the agenda around the professionalization of evaluation, making explicit some of the concerns that have appeared to be linked to it. The central role played by VOPEs in that process is discussed, introducing their involvement with professionalization at different levels. The final remarks will stress the centrality of transforming the journey towards professionalization into a truly collaborative and bottom up process.