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This is a most welcome addition to the growing world literature on participatory research and evaluation. It is welcome because there is a large and continuing interest in participatory evaluation on the world scene. Nongovernmental organizations, government social agencies, intergovernmental bodies, and social movement structures of many types have expressed a preference for participatory forms of evaluation. Indeed, unless an evaluation plan has some provision for participation by either intended beneficiaries or stakeholders, it is likely to be rejected in these times. This book provides readers with a variety of articles covering such critical themes as ethics, techniques, case studies, historic reflections, and invitations to action. Further, this anthology brings together some of the best-known specialists from many parts of the world. This is a book that has a global feel because it is an articulation of a global network of colleagues who in a variety of formal and informal ways follow and support one another's work.

This book is doubly important because it represents a collaboration between two senior international scholar-activist-practitioners. Yusuf Kassam and Edward T. Jackson have both been at the task of thinking about and doing participatory research for roughly twenty-five years each. Yusuf Kassam began working along these lines as a professor of adult education at Tanzania's University of Dar es Salaam and as director of the Institute of Adult Education in his birthplace of Tanzania. He was the first coordinator of the African Participatory Research Network, affiliated with the work of the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE), and subsequently worked at the ICAE Secretariat in Toronto, Canada, for many years. His pioneering work in participatory research and evaluation, particularly his giving audibility to the voices of rural literacy learners, is internationally respected.

Ted Jackson began his work in the evaluation of social action projects with Frontier College in Canada's Atlantic provinces in the early 1970s. He developed his thinking and practical skills further in collaboration with a number of indigenous colleagues, including Grace Hudson and Gerry McKay from Big Trout Lake in northern Ontario, as they worked on an evaluation of the environmental impact of water and sanitation options in that community. His comparative and international work began at that time as well, as he made his first links with Ghana via a Canadian government project on rural water supply in the northern region of that country. He has gone on to become, along with Yusuf Kassam, among the best-known and best-respected evaluation specialists internationally. And like Kassam, Jackson's life's work maintains a consistent subtext of social, economic, and environmental justice.

This volume, like the concept of participatory evaluation itself, contains and represents the full range of tensions that an applied practice in this world manifests. Who has the right to evaluate whom? If evaluation is, as Kamla Bhasin notes in this collection, "reflection on action," why is the literature of evaluation so monopolized by the writings of those who serve the dominant interests? Why does the evaluation literature so seldom reflect the direct concerns of the majority of the poor? What are the discursive forms of a social movement evaluation literature? Like the concept of research itself, is the very concept of evaluation an intellectual construct of knowledge and power, as Foucault notes, which limits the possibility of transforming power relations? In other words, do the language and forms of work that make up the discourse and practice of evaluation inevitably limit it as a transformative practice? Or can a social movement or civil society organization initiate processes of participatory evaluation that will in fact contribute to the strengthening of resistance and/or the modifying of power relations in specific contexts?

Covering oneself in a cloak of participatory evaluation is another tension raised by this volume. There are many evaluations that claim to be participatory but upon reflection are anything but. And in a global context, where the very word development has become a code for a form of economic and political relations that is ultimately destructive, the fact that so much of the evaluation literature grows from that financial base raises still more questions. Participation, when invited by the powerful of the less powerful, offers as many dangers as opportunities.

But at the same time, this volume provides readers with ideas about working in many new directions. Those of us who from time to time are engaged in evaluations might ask ourselves a series of questions provoked by these authors. To what extent are the voices of those who have been marginalized made audible through our work? What structures are in place to protect those whose voices are critical? To what degree does our work enhance the capacity to resist of women, racial minorities, the young, and those with different physical or mental abilities? How can real economic or related benefits for all those participating along with us be achieved? How can new paradigms for community, sustainability, deepened democratic life, or human rights be shared if and when they arise from work of this nature? And finally, how can social movements and civil society organizations themselves initiate effective evaluations of the institutions and forms of political and economic domination that most affect them?

One of my first publications was a chapter on evaluation for the 1972 Handbook on Adult Education published by the Institute of Adult Education in Dar es Salaam. The title of that chapter was "Evaluation: How Well Have We Done?" Based on the spirit represented by this most valuable and internationally representative book, I would say that we have done very well indeed, but there is still much to keep us busy for years to come.

Budd L. Hall
Chair, Department of Adult Education, Community Development and Counselling Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

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