Evaluation as Reparation, Reclamation, and Renewal: Reorienting Our Justice Signposts Toward Restorative Validity

In this reflexive piece, I consider these questions: How can evaluators reframe validity as a stance and agenda rooted in restoration and healing? How can evaluation contribute more fully to transformative, restorative, and abolitionist signposts such as reparation, reclamation, and renewal? I first review the restorative validity agenda, showing how evaluators can (re)orient their theories and practices toward relationships, justice, and liberation. Drawing on an example of a transformative participatory evaluation in Guatemala, I demonstrate how evaluation can be used to repair (evaluative) harms, renew relationships, and restore and reclaim the humanity of evaluator and evaluated alike. I conclude with a discussion of how our evaluative activities shifted: moving beyond the utilitarianism in punitive, colonial, and carceral logics; understanding how to consider and apply redistributive and reparative justice; and promoting opportunities for evaluator and evaluated to restore and reclaim their cultures-histories-identities-lands.