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Decolonisation in Evaluation and Use of Emotional Intelligence – A Connect by Rashmi Agrawal

Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.


Hello, AEA365! I am Rashimi Agrawal a founding member of Evaluation Community of India (ECOI) and a member of the Governing Board, Community of Evaluators, South Asia (CoE, SA), and a practitioner of development evaluation for over three decades. I am also a member of IDEAc, and managing group of EvalGender+. Evaluation capacity development is my passion and after my several years of association with Government sector, I now work as independent M&E consultant.

From the very beginning of my joining the evaluation field, I have always been concerned about the iniquitous power dynamics where people at large have no significant role or any voice in development and evaluation. Even though the development evaluation landscape has undergone a sea-change, particularly since the adoption of the global development goals (SDGs), both in the range and nature of evaluation demand, I find there is still a long way to go in innovating approaches and techniques that could lead to better listening to the voices of people at grassroots, and decolonise evaluation. Evaluation needs to be as per the language and methods people understand. In the process I also try to understand the phrases of ‘transformation in evaluation’ and or ‘decolonisation in evaluation’; sometimes in skirmish with emerging technical scenario and processes while in field. I am sure many other scholars have similar thinking and experience and trying to think out of box.

I remember examples of such conflict which I would like to share with you. While collecting data in villages for development program evaluations, I was put in a dilemma several times if I concentrated on the standardized questionnaire. I had to fill on my computer or give time to the interviewee narrative that he/she wanted to communicate with moist eyes. The constraint of time was always there. Being a student of psychology, it appeared that at such times psychology and evaluation collided, overlapped or intersected. Many a times I was smiling with a smile on peoples’ face, or getting sad seeing their moist eyes. There was some emotional connect and I had to forget the technology and the questionnaire – perhaps the emotional intelligence won.

Lessons Learned

I was compelled to think is this the decolonisation in evaluation? I felt yes.

The way things are progressing, I visualize that in years to come the concept of evidence-based decision-making will permeate all developmental processes with evaluations helping in unearthing evidence of transformations taking place in the economic and social fabric of the society. With practical experiments and learning I am sure it would lead to co-liberation. The development process for sure will be viewed not in terms of small incremental steps, but leading to a positive transformation of society in different fields as identified by the SDGs with ‘all together’ even with those who do not understand the ABC of evaluation the way we think we do.

It has been my endeavour over the past few years to contribute in spreading evaluation culture, making evaluation practice more inclusive, and to work out capacity building responses to the ongoing transformational changes with establishing a connect between emotional intelligence and evaluation in spite of the fact that technology in big way is trying to challenge. ECOI, the VOPE through which now I work, operates with the mission to promote demand for and strengthen theory, practice and utilization through knowledge sharing and capacity building involving members, partners and diverse networks following quality standards involving new actors and innovative participatory methods in tune with localised intelligence. Today, many young and emerging evaluators in India believe in these participatory methods and experiment with a variety of approaches with excellent results.

I think that if we want to accelerate the process of decolonisation in evaluation, we need to establish a link between ‘emotional intelligence and decolonisation in evaluation’. Decolonisation needs a human touch- a step to expedite power sharing.


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