A Precarious Balance: Educational Evaluation Capacity Building in a Globalized Society

The integration of evaluation into organizational management culture is a topic of increasing interest in evaluation as general domain of inquiry (Cousins, Goh, Clark, & Lee, 2004; Sanders, 2003). Theoretically, to the extent that organizations embrace evaluative inquiry—systematic inquiry designed to support judgments about the merit, worth, and significance of programs and policies and to support ongoing decision making—as a management and learning system, they will be able to meet accountability demands better in addition to fostering individual, group, and collective learning about what does and does not work. Research-based knowledge on organizational learning, evaluation capacity building, and evaluation consequences (use, influence) provides growing support for this assertion.