Local Ownership in Evaluation: Moving from Participant Inclusion to Ownership in Evaluation Decision Making

As international assistance shifts to emphasise the importance of local ownership in ensuring relevance, effectiveness and sustainability, the ways that practice is evaluated must also shift. To date, conversations about local ownership have primarily focused on policies or programme design and implementation. This briefing paper provides practitioners – particularly international NGOs and donors – with a rationale and framework for promoting local ownership in evaluation. Together with a forthcoming guidance document, this paper is meant to provide practitioners and evaluators with tools to extend local ownership to evaluation.

This paper argues that the international assistance community must go beyond the inclusion of programme/project participants in deciding what should be done and in providing feedback on how well something is being done. Participants also need to be co-owners of evaluation processes: involved in determining the questions the evaluation asks, how to judge the quality of an intervention, and how to interpret the data collected. In other words, the local ownership agenda must extend to all parts of the programme cycle.