RealWorld Evaluation: Working Under Budget, Time, Data, and Political Constraints

RealWorld Evaluation: Working Under Budget, Time, Data, and Political Constraints addresses the challenges of conducting program evaluations in real-world contexts where evaluators and their clients face budget and time constraints. The book is organized around the authors’ seven-step model that has been tested in workshops and practice environments to help the evaluation implementers and managers make the best choices when faced with real world constraints. The Third Edition includes a new chapter on gender equality and women’s empowerment and discussion of digital technology and data science.

Michael Bamberger has been involved in development evaluation for fifty years. Beginning in Latin America where he worked in urban community development and evaluation for over a decade, he became interested in the coping strategies of low-income communities, how they were affected by and how they influenced development efforts. Most evaluation research fails to capture these survival strategies, frequently underestimating the resilience of these communities – particularly women and female-headed households. During 20 years with the World Bank he worked as monitoring and evaluation advisor for the Urban Development Department, evaluation training coordinator with the Economic Development Department and Senior Sociologist in the Gender and Development Department. After retiring from the Bank in 2001 he has worked as a development evaluation consultant with more than 10 UN agencies as well as development banks, bilateral development agencies, NGOs and foundations. Since 2001 he has been on the faculty of the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET). Recent publications include: (with Jim Rugh and Linda Mabry) RealWorld Evaluation: Working under budget, time, data and political constraints (2012 second edition); (with Marco Segone) How to design and manage equity focused evaluations (2011); Engendering Monitoring and Evaluation ( 2013 ); (with Linda Raftree) Emerging opportunities: Monitoring and evaluation in a tech-enabled world (2014); (with Marco Segone and Shravanti Reddy) How to integrate gender equality and social equity in national evaluation policies and systems (2014).

Linda Mabry is a faculty member at Washington State University specializing in program evaluation, student assessment, and research and evaluation methodology. She currently serves as president of the Oregon Program Evaluation Network and on the editorial board for Studies in Educational Evaluation. She has served in a variety of leadership positions for the American Evaluation Association, including the Board of Directors, chair of the Task Force on Educational Accountability, and chair of the Theories of Evaluation topical interest group. She has also served n the Board of Trustees for the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessments and on the Performance Assessment Review Board of New York. She has conducted evaluations for the U.S. Department of Education, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Jacob Javits Foundation, Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Ameritech Corporation, ATT-Comcast Corporation, the New York City Fund for Public Education, the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, the Chicago Teachers Academy of Mathematics and Science, and a variety of university, state, and school agencies. She has published in a number of scholarly journals and written several books, including Evaluation and the Postmodern Dilemma (1997) and Portfolios Plus: A Critical Guide to Performance Assessment (1999).