Explain the role of stakeholders and provide some examples of key stakeholders in evaluations.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Every program is necessarily a social structure in which various individuals and groups engage in the roles and activities that constitute the program. In addition, every program is a nexus in a set of political and social relationships among those with involvement or interest in the program, such as relevant decision-makers, competing programs, and advocacy groups. The nature of the evaluator’s relationship with these and other stakeholders who may participate in the evaluation or have an interest in it will shape the way the evaluation questions are framed. The primary stakeholders potentially influential in this process may include the following:
Decision-makers: persons responsible for deciding whether the program is to be initiated, continued, discontinued, expanded, modified, restructured, or curtailed
Program sponsors: individuals with positions of responsibility in public agencies or private organizations that initiate and fund the program; they may overlap with decision-makers
Evaluation sponsors: individuals in public agencies or private organizations who initiate and fund the evaluation (the evaluation sponsors and program sponsors may be the same)
Target participants: persons, households, or other units that are intended to receive the intervention or services being evaluated
Program managers: personnel responsible for overseeing and administering the intervention program
Program staff: personnel responsible for delivering the program services or functioning in supporting roles
Program competitors: organizations or groups that compete with the program;for instance, a private organization receiving public funds to operate charter schools will be in competition with public schools also supported by public funds
Contextual stakeholders: organizations, groups, and individuals in the environment of a program with interests in what the program is doing or what happens to it; e.g., other agencies or programs, journalists, public officials, advocacy organizations, or citizens’ groups in the jurisdiction in which the program operates
Evaluation and research community: evaluation professionals who read evaluations and review their technical quality and credibility along with researchers who work in areas related to that type of program.
The most influential stakeholder will typically be the evaluation sponsor, the agent that initiates the evaluation, usually provides the funding, and makes decisions about how and when it will be done and who will do it. Various relationships with the evaluation sponsor and other stakeholders are possible and will largely depend on the sponsor’s preferences and whatever negotiation takes place with the evaluator. The evaluator’s relationship to stakeholders is so influential for shaping the evaluation process that a special vocabulary has arisen to describe the major variants.