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Confronting Capitalism:

Evaluation That Fosters Social Equity

Sandra Mathison

Most evaluators think in a micro context, a legacy of evaluation practice that

serves other disciplines, decision-makers, policy-makers, funding agencies, and

beneficiaries. Evaluation practice is local (even when the context is geographically vast)

and mostly responsive to particular concerns about programmatic effectiveness. The

value of evaluation for alleviating conditions of poverty are typically manifest in

identifying effective strategies or improvements to strategies for the relief of poverty.

While it is entirely appropriate for evaluation practitioners to work in this way, it blunts

our attention to big questions about why this intervention, why this strategy, why these

people and not others.

Consider one simple example—food security, a core concept in poverty reduction.

Programs to increase food security are created by agencies (like Save the Children) or

governments (like USAID or federal Departments of Agriculture) who are in turn the

architects of definitions of program success. USAID declares evaluations should

emphasize performance-based management to “strengthen the impact these programs

have on the well-being of their intended beneficiaries.” While there are many kinds of

food security programs, one strategy is ‘food for work,’ an approach where food aid

payment is exchanged for labor in public works programs designed to build and maintain

local infrastructure (such as, roads, wells, latrines, or schools). This program type (a

commodity exchange approach to a basic human need, in this case food) privileges local

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economic growth as the major outcome, and food security is one means to that end.

Beneficiaries are both capitalists and people who need food. A response to food security

that emphasized use value (rather than exchange value) would lead to different strategies

and indicators of success; for example, a use value conceptualization might see food as

family maintenance, love, aesthetics, happiness, neighborliness, and community building.

By most accounts, evaluators’ work conceptualized as improving the impact of

poverty-reduction programs in this closed system isn’t contributing enough to poverty-

reduction, human rights, and access to food, water, education and health care. That half

of the world’s children live in poverty and 22,000 children living in poverty die each day

suggests collective efforts are not adequate for supporting those in greatest need.

Evaluators, while continuing to work within programmatic frames, must also step

outside the frameworks of providing for and improving the conditions of those in greatest

need established by others, and investigate the frameworks themselves. A global neo-

liberalism establishes taken-for-granted forms of problem definition, solutions, and

indicators of success. Some evaluators must begin to take a macro sociological view and

investigate the marriage of capital (often in the guise of philanthropy, what is called

philanthrocapitalism) and government. Within global neoliberalism many poverty

reduction programs are connected to economic development and growth, distracting

citizens from other conceptualizations of poverty reduction (for example, in food for

work programs, distracting people from cultivating existing gardens in search of their

own food sovereignty or food redistribution programs that subvert local markets and

small farming operations to corporate profit).

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In what follows, I will first map the continuing demise of democracy and the

concomitant rise of global neoliberalism, and the impact this has on everyday life,

including evaluation. A key feature of global neoliberalism is the rise of

philanthrocapitalism, which has direct, specific consequences for evaluation practice. I

will argue that challenging capitalist neoliberal frameworks is in the province of

evaluation, and that evaluators’ work in service of the public good necessitates a macro

level of analysis if evaluation as a profession is to have a greater impact on alleviating

global conditions of poverty. The chapter concludes with three concrete ways evaluation

might challenge global neoliberalism.

Capitalism Trumps Democracy

By democracy I simply mean a political system in which policies and practices

are decided or at least significantly influenced by the public will, that is, that people have

meaningful opportunities to be involved in public policy formation. Political structures

that facilitate democracy are: “1) elected officials, 2) free, fair and frequent elections, 3)

freedom of expression, 4) alternative sources of information, 5) associational autonomy,

and 6) inclusive citizenship” (Dahl, 1998, p. 85). By capitalism I mean both an economic

system where the means of production are privately or corporately owned and the goal is

the accumulation of profit, as well as a social system based on individual autonomy.

In many parts of the world people cling to the notion of democracy and

romanticize a relatively brief period of democratic capitalism following World War II

when economic growth and the welfare state coexisted. Democratic capitalism began to

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dissolve in the 70s and neoliberalism, brewing since the 1940s, took its place.1 Electoral

politics are often the last vestige of democracy, and because elections are held the illusion

of public participation is maintained. That some nations and local jurisdictions make

voting a legal obligation, including levying fines for failure to vote, raises questions

about freedom of expression even in voting practices. Also, electoral politics are no

guarantee of democracy; even though 63% of the world’s nations hold elections only

45% of nations are considered democratic in terms of both political and civil liberties

(Puddington, 2014).

Nation states may hold elections but when citizens are denied basic freedoms and

civil liberties this form of governance is sometimes referred to as illiberal democracy

(Levitsky & Way, 2002). Chomsky (2002, p. 16-17) calls this limited democratic

participation through voting “spectator democracy,” perhaps more subtle than examples

of illiberal democracies (like Singapore or Russia) and more descriptive of nations still

seen as liberal democracies (like the U.S., Canada and most of the EU).

Now there are two “functions” in a democracy: The specialized class, the

responsible men, carry out the executive function, which means they do the

thinking and planning and understand the common interests. Then, there is the

bewildered herd, and they have a function in democracy too. Their function in a

democracy, he said, is to be “spectators,” not participants in action. But they have

1 The Mont Pèlerin Society formed in 1947 is seen by many as key to the ascendancy of neoliberalism. Founded by economist Friedrich Hayek but popularized by Milton Friedman, the MPS today sees “danger in the expansion of government, not least in state welfare, in the power of trade unions and business monopoly, and in the continuing threat and reality of inflation.” https://www.montpelerin.org/montpelerin/home.html Friedman’s involvement with the National Bureau of Economic Research was also important.

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more of a function than that, because it’s a democracy. Occasionally they are

allowed to lend their weight to one or another member of the specialized class. In

other words, they’re allowed to say, “We want you to be our leader” or “We

want you to be our leader.” That’s because it’s a democracy and not a totalitarian

state. That’s called an election. But once they’ve lent their weight to one or

another member of the specialized class they’re supposed to sink back and

become spectators of action, but not participants.

Spectator democracy helps to explain how those with capital, rather than the

public, control decision-making. Chomsky (2002) argues the “bewildered herd” is

manipulated through media, advertising and lobbying to go along with capitalists by

“manufacturing consent.” Around the world, state police responses to resistance to public

policy and the lived experiences it creates means police and military force should be

added to Chomsky’s list.

Consider the aggressive police and military responses to the Occupy Movement,

Brazilian protests of the 2014 World Cup, the Turkish ‘Gezi resistance’, and the Arab

Spring, what Harvey (2014) calls the ‘specter of violence’ response to inequities created

by capitalism. When citizens resist neoliberalism they exercise their political autonomy, a

central democratic value, which is often met with violence and suspicion. A good

example of the perceived suspicious nature of resistance is the U.S. Department of

Defense Minerva Initiative that “leverages and focus[es] the resources of the Nation’s top

universities” on social movements, social resilience, escalation of power, and conflict and

security (http://minerva.dtic.mil/overview.html). This reflects a strong suspicion that the

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exercise of more fulsome democracy, more than spectator democracy and more than

casting a vote, will lead to unwelcome disruption of the current global capitalism.

In Europe, economic crises have sometimes simply suspended people’s

participation in democracy through elections with appointments of heads of state willing

to implement austerity measures that satisfy capitalists. Greece and Italy are two recent

examples. In 2011 Greece’s prime minister, George Papandreou planned to put the

European Union austerity demands to a vote through a public referendum and was

immediately replaced by the appointed Lucas Papademos, a banker. Similarly, in Italy, as

the debt crisis mounted Silvio Berlusconi ‘resigned’ as prime minister and was replaced

by the appointed Mario Monit, an economist and advisor to Goldman Sachs. The point is

not that either Papandreou or Berlusconi should have continued in their elected positions,

but that a non-elected prime minister replaced each.

On the surface it would seem that capitalism and democracy could co-exist (given

capitalism’s privileging of individual autonomy) but in reality a handful of individuals,

not the entire polity, are most influential in government policy.2 Democracy’s demise is

due in large part to brow beating the working and middle classes and diminishing

participation in politics given a preoccupation with stagnant wages, increased working

hours, and concern over rising household debt (Wolff, 2012). Daily life grinds people

down leaving little energy for political engagement. This is not a blaming the victim

2 While it is not the purpose of this chapter to solve the problems of democracy qua democracy, I note that advocating for a return to liberal or capitalist democracy is unlikely to foster meaningful change to a political philosophy more likely to address issues of poverty and inequity. Libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism are two alternative frameworks that I would explore in a fuller discussion of ‘if not this, then what?’

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argument, but recognizes the capitalist intent to use wage labor to control those who

might object.

Street (2014) presents a more complex and systemic explanation by pointing to

structural racism in the U.S. that results in race-based mass incarceration further disabling

political participation by the working class and poor. For democracy to work everyone

must have “the time, information, counsel, and other supports needed to participate

effectively in decision-making in the workplace and the local, regional, and national

levels of their residential communities” (Wolff, 2012, p. ). Both Wolff and Street agree

that time poverty is key to stripping the middle and working classes (the 99%) of the

luxury to become informed about issues and to participate in political action.

Democracy has bowed to capitalism’s strength. “Economic elites and organized

groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S.

government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or

no independent influence” (Gilens & Page, 2014, p. 4). This economic elite works “to

shape political and intellectual culture and policy in their favor by funding political

campaigns, hiring lobbyists, buying and controlling the media, manipulating public

relations and propaganda, investing in the educational system, offering lucrative

employment and other economic opportunities to policy makers and their families,

holding key policy-making positions, and threatening to withdraw investment from

places that don’t submit to capital’s rules while promising to invest in places that do”

(Street, 2014, p.18). It is likely that this argument extrapolates to other countries,

although in some instances economic elites are conflated with aristocratic or religious

elites.

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Capitalism has trumped democracy in the current global era of neoliberalism.

Unlike classic liberalism, a basic tenet of neoliberalism is the pivotal role state

governments play in facilitating and fostering the interests of economic elites. While the

rhetoric of free markets prevails, at the heart of contemporary capitalism (neoliberalism)

there are no free markets rather only the appearance of such, manufactured to serve the

interests of the economic elite. While outward appearances are of a state government

retreat from public life (deregulation, for example) neoliberalism is in fact more

appropriately conceptualized as a remaking of the role of the state, one where

governments create or support markets, deregulate and privatize public goods and

services to support the interests of capital, and invest in saving economic elites rather

than the majority of the polity. In some parts of the world (China is the best example)

democracy was never assumed to be a good or necessary political philosophy, and

capitalism operates within a repressive one party rule that fosters profit making for a

bureaucratic elite. “Most of the world is now in the grip of hyper-capitalism, what we call

neoliberalism. This new system has brought us careening economic instabilities,

worsening ecological disasters, brutal wars, a depleted public sector and poverty in the

affluent global north, and the prospect of mass famine in the global south” (Fox Piven,

2014, p.).

Neoliberalism offers up three key strategies for overcoming poverty: economic

growth, jobs, and cultivation of ambition (Reich, 2014). What we see, however, is that

these strategies simply do not alleviate poverty. Economic growth in the U.S. and China

has been vibrant but little has trickled down to the working class, while Canada’s

economic growth has been more modest and fewer people per capita live in poverty.

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Giving people jobs also does not necessarily reduce poverty, especially when those jobs

do not pay a living wage, and in general the proportion of people in the labor force is

diminishing. And, downloading the causes of poverty to those who are poor by enjoining

them to work and try harder blames those made victims by capitalism.

So neoliberalism is not merely in intrusion of a market mentality on government

policies and services, it is also a remaking of individuals and their conceptions of their

social world in market terms. “[T]he state itself must construct and construe itself in

market terms, as well as develop policies and promulgate a political culture that figures

citizens exhaustively as rational economic actors in every sphere of life” (Brown, 2006,

p. 694). This reconstruction of person as neoliberal citizen is key to the triumph of

capitalism over democracy, and I will discuss this in the next section.

That neoliberalism does not serve the common good is obvious when we

understand that capitalism is about profit making, about building wealth. Democracy is

about equality, fairness, political autonomy, a free press, and equity while capitalism is

about inequality, the greatest good (profit) to those with capital: these democratic values

are jettisoned for a much simpler profit oriented market rationality. Neoliberalism

depends on no particular political system, and so democracy easily becomes a rhetorical

device, a tactic for manufacturing consent that obscures the fact that at best many nation

states are plutocracies, others are oligarchies.

Rich People Rule

The Gilens and Page (2014) analysis of 1,779 policy outcomes over a period of

more than 20 years provides empirical evidence that rich people, economic elites, control

the U.S. government and the policies that shape the lives of those who are not in this

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club. At the same time and in the last decade, income inequality has exploded. Pikkety’s

(2014) treatise on capital argues this inequality is historically the norm and will continue

to expand because wage labor income grows at a much slower rate than the return on

capital, which is owned by already rich people who are becoming ever richer.

A case in point is U.S. education reform where a small group of rich white men

have bankrolled and directed initiatives to improve education over the past 35 years. The

latest and most obvious of these are Bill Gates’ promotion and funding of the Common

Core State Standards (Layton, 2014), a de facto national curriculum, and David Welch’s

moneyed access to the California courts to successfully challenge teachers’ tenure in the

Vergara case (Cohen, 2014). Other educational reforms in the U.S. are bankrolled and

directed by the Broad and Walton families, and most recently the creator of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg. Even non-U.S. citizens like Carlos Slim, Mexico’s communication

monopolist and one of the richest people in the world, is involved in U.S. educational

reform by supporting the Kahn Academy. Prior to the Clinton era, school improvement

efforts were certainly political but with a much broader participation. In effect, the U.S.

economic elite is currently buying their version of educational reform with little input

from teachers, the public, and the support of only a handful of education scholars.

Not only do rich people rule in their own countries, but because capitalism is

global rich people actually rule the world by, for example, redistributing jobs to low labor

cost countries, fomenting wars to exploit natural resources (Roberts, Secour & Spark,

2003), and exploiting nations for entertainment (Zirin, 2014). This global capitalism, the

view of the world as one big market characterized by fiscal austerity, free trade and

military force is what neoliberals bring as the means for peace and prosperity for all.

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International organizations (like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the

World Trade Organization, and even the World Health Organization) are key in

promulgating and enforcing neoliberal economic values, and increasingly nation states

exercise economically inspired militarism in search of peace and prosperity.

Everyday Neoliberalism

Lived experience of neoliberalism requires the reinvention of individual as

citizen, and repurposes social constructs to fit within a global market framework.

Everyone and everything can be marketized, commodified and/or monetized; save a few

things like children and votes everything is for sale in the neoliberalized world.

Individuals and Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is often couched in terms of capitalists, governments, and free

markets, ideas that seem distant from the lives of individuals. But neoliberalism also

reconstructs the sense of self as citizen, a citizen who is first and foremost a rational

economic actor. We have become ‘neoliberalized,’ to borrow David Harvey’s term.

Privileging individual autonomy converts social problems to individual problems. This

has two consequences: the shifting of responsibility and blame to individuals for their

own circumstances, and the promotion of free market, privatized solutions to individual

problems.

Blaming the victim occurs and solutions to poverty or poor health are to be found

through greater personal individual determination. An example of this individualism is

manifest in the enormity of the self-help industry, a response that cuts across cultures and

contributes to a global response since most self-help strategies are exported from the U.S.

(Farquhar & Zhang, 2008). If you are poor, unhappy, unfulfilled, or unhealthy you are

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given a range of options (books, programs, supplements, online tools, apps) for helping

yourself to overcome your circumstances, and if you fail it is because you lack fortitude

or commitment to your own improvement. Another example of individualizing social

problems is the current educational emphasis on self-control and grit, both ideas that not

only demand individual responsibility but also assert these traits can and should be taught

to all children. (See Kohn, 2014 for a critique of the notion of grit and the consequences

of over-emphasizing self-discipline in schools.)

In addition, the choices for solving your own problems are marketized (for

example, competing weight loss programs) lending the impression of freedom to chose

the best solution. “The conversion of socially, economically, and politically produced

problems into consumer items depoliticizes what has been historically produced, and it

especially depoliticizes capitalism itself” (Brown, 2006, p.704). These consumer items

also become monetized, creating ever more strain on individuals to have money for what

might be considered basic human rights (food, water, housing, education, access to

information) but with little ability to increase the amount of money to pay for these

commodities.

Using education as an example again, making school a choice shifts the

responsibility of providing a good education for children away from the state and to

parents. In many places this means a choice between public and private schools, but the

choices have expanded tremendously with neo-liberalism and now include charter

schools, home schooling, religious schools, online schools, to name the most obvious.

The importance of choice in schools is two-fold within neo-liberalism: the increase in

choices is offered, on its own, as a way to improve the quality of all schooling, and if as

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an individual you make a bad choice you have no one to blame but yourself. These

choices are often illusory and the interest in school choice is much more complicated as

illustrated, for example, by hedge fund investors keen interest in charter schools (Singer,

2014).

Neoliberalized citizens are commodified selves reflected both in a definition of

self through commodities, things we buy and possess, and the redefinition of self in

market terms, such as personal branding or the quantified or commodified self (Roderick,

2010). In Marxist terms, as people live a sense of self as commodity we begin to think

about our “exchange value” and construct a lifestyle and relationships that are

instrumental, impersonal and change as does the market. A hyper-individualized,

marketable self subverts democracy, public good, and community.

Neo-liberalism’s Repurposing of Social Constructs

There are a number of social constructs (philanthropy, diplomacy, international

aid, social responsibility, charity, not for profit, to name a few) that are repurposed within

neoliberalism, but here I will focus on just one that is key to evaluation practice—

philanthropy. Philanthropy is a powerful idea that permeates our sense of helping others,

developing communities, and connecting people in mutually beneficial ways. A

tremendous amount of evaluation effort related to poverty reduction and social equality is

within initiatives, projects and programs connected to philanthropic organizations.

Philanthropy, once noblesse oblige that emphasized giving more than outcomes,

has been drastically repurposed to focus on or serve economic interests, using market

strategies, and as such reconceptualizes what it means to help those in need. In 2006, a

short article in The Economist gave this reconceptualization a name—

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philanthrocapitalism—advocating that philanthropy be more like for-profit marketplaces

where philanthropists are investors, investing in solutions to social problems and

maximizing social return demonstrated by measurable results (Bishop, 2006).

Philanthrocapitalism is using private wealth to solve social problems with a keen eye on

getting results; it is not meant to make capitalists and their corporations more charitable,

but to make charity more business-like. The “Good Club,” a small group of billionaire

philanthropists set the stage for current global efforts to alleviate poverty and inequity,

but their foundations operate with little accountability. “As long as they maintain a

governing body, obey the law, and file some basic information with their regulators, they

can do whatever they like” (Edwards, 2011, p.121).

Philanthrocapitalism. We understand the idea of philanthropy as actions,

especially the donation of money3, meant to promote the welfare of others. We connect

philanthropy to positive attributes such as altruism, kindheartedness, charitableness,

compassion, and civic-mindedness, and see it as a major strategy for alleviating poverty,

poor health and human suffering. Philanthrocapitalism is “driven by a desire to bring

hard-nosed strategy, performance metrics, and an emphasis on effectiveness to the

nonprofit sector” (Jenkins, 2011, p. 755). Many philanthropic organizations have

themselves become corporations with huge budgets, corporate branding, sometimes

marketing disaster and human suffering to raise money, partnering with multi-national

corporations, and emphasizing a diminished scope of hope (measurable smaller successes

over far-reaching, global changes) fostered by restricted giving (narrowing the ways

3 An interesting series of short essays on “The Role of Money” in the alleviation of injustice and inequality can be found on the website Transformation. https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation-themes/role-of-money

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money can be used). The latter shift is important for evaluation because it makes the

work of philanthropy easier to measure and therefore evaluate. LeBaron and Dauvergne

(2014) call this a ‘tapering of ambition’: “NGOs are channeling more energy and

resources into projects and away from campaigns for deep, systemic change. And their

goals increasingly reinforce the social, economic and political systems they say they want

to transform.” Non-profits and NGOs become suspect and perceived as contributing to

the spread of corporate, capitalist ways of conceptualizing and being in the world (see,

for example, the collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit

Industrial Complex edited by INCITE!).

Giving in the context of philanthrocapitalism is tied to notions of acting

strategically and clearly defining performance metrics to demonstrate programmatic

effectiveness, giving is described as results-oriented4. This emphasis mimics the ‘hard-

nosed’ business thinking, but may emphasize what can be measured (profit) over what is

important but incredibly difficult to measure (civic engagement, due process,

compassion, and so on). Considering the advantages and disadvantages of using

performance metrics is in the purview of evaluation—the potential for narrowly and ill

defined metrics is high, as is the tendency for narrowly defined goals to divert attention

from unanticipated (good and bad) outcomes. A business model privileges market share

and returns on investment over empowerment and quality of relationships, and the latter

may well be more important in a civil society albeit not so easily measured.

4 The dominant mode of philanthrocapitalism has been strategic grant giving, an idea which for some has given way to ‘impact investing,’ a still murky concept that emphasizes investing in organizations that show promise of making a social or environmental impact. Currently the proffered multiple bottom lines (profit and impact) seem not to work together any better than in the grant making strategy.

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In a neoliberal context, philanthrocapitalism serves to illustrate that even

capitalists have feelings but casts those feelings in economic terms and blurs the private-

public distinction, a hallmark of neoliberalism. This approach is based on a venture

capital model dominated by the idea that ‘strategy’ is deployed to generate revenue,

achieve financial sustainability, and emphasizing rapid ‘scaling-up’ to provide solutions.

In this framework, a philanthropic foundation defines the problem, identifies the solution,

decides how long it should take to solve the problem, and then seeks governmental and

organizational partners to implement their vision.

If you want to understand philanthrocapitalism, start with the three M’s: Money,

Markets, and Measurement. Some might add a fourth, Management. The first M,

money, is the idea that the wealthy, particularly the super wealthy, should take

greater responsibility for using their wealth for the common good. This often is

paired with an explicit call for philanthropists to be more “hands on” in their

giving. The second M, markets, is the idea that market forces should sort effective

social programs from ineffective social programs. The third M, measurement is

the idea is that resources should be used in a targeted and rational way based on

data in order to identify and scale successful social programs. (Rogers, 2011, p.

378).

Philanthrocapitalism is a global phenomenon, it fits best in contexts where

capitalism and democracy co-exist and is more problematic where capitalism and

communism co-exist, like in China. The number of super rich individuals in the Far and

Middle East is growing, especially in China and India and that has the potential to create

global alliances extending the reach of philanthrocapitalism. The term Africapitalism has

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been used for the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a USAID initiative to

alleviate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa through agribusiness initiatives.

I have alluded to the influence that capitalists in the U.S. have on education and

schooling, and this influence comes through philanthropy with an agenda.

Philanthrocapitalism “treats schooling as a private consumable service and promotes

business remedies, reforms, and assumptions with regard to public schooling” (Saltman,

2009, 2010, p. 53). In addition, education directed philanthrocapitalism promotes

strategies that have made venture capitalists rich, that is, the expression of particular

values and political ideologies hostile to public education, and that promote corporate and

private perspectives on educational governance. School is conceptualized as an

investment from which one expects returns, evaluation is conceptualized as performance

measurement, schools become franchises, and donations are leveraged.

The foundations of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the real estate and insurance magnate

Eli Broad, the Walton family (of Walmart fortune), and other billionaires have come to

dominate charitable funding to education. As philanthrocapitalists, they see themselves as

investors rather than donors and seek specific changes to public schooling: promoting and

financing the expansion of charter schools, financing Teach for America, development of

the Common Core State Standards to create a de facto U.S. national curriculum, and

teacher union busting through judicial appeals. These foundations believe they know

what ails schooling and have the solutions to educational problems. Often those are

singular solutions (like the Gates Foundation plan to create small schools) which are

discarded quickly because anticipated results are neither easily nor swiftly achieved only

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to be replaced by another singular solution (‘scientific’ evaluation of teachers through

value added measurement or a national curriculum).

The impact of philanthrocapitalism on food security, the example I used at the

beginning of this chapter, builds on a model of using science rather than social change to

alleviate hunger. Brooks’ (2013) analyses of the Golden Rice Project and the

development of drought resistant maize in Sub Saharan Africa illustrate the unflinching

commitment to a logic model that equates philanthropy with capital accumulation. These

examples “valorize corporate donors” and “[divert] attention away from the multiplicity

of alternative approaches that respond to the conditions, needs and practices that

constitute smallholder agriculture in diverse locations” (Brooks, 2013, p. 3).

The companion part to philanthropic giving is the complicity of the state. In the

U.S. one example is the Obama administration’s relatively small ($50 million) Social

Innovation Fund (SIF), described as:

New way of doing business for the federal government that stands to yield greater

impact on urgent national challenges. The Social Innovation Fund targets millions

of public-private dollars to expand effective solutions across three issue areas:

economic opportunity, healthy futures and, youth development and school

support. This work will directly impact thousands of low-income families and

create a catalog of proven approaches that can be replicated in communities

across the country. (Retrieved from

http://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/social-innovation-fund/about-sif )

The SIF leverages small public dollar investment with substantial private dollar

investment to marshal resources to create and disseminate programs for the poor. The

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visual in Figure 1 illustrates the neoliberal pact between the public state and private

capital.

Figure 1. Illustration of philanthrocapitalism’s combining private and public funding.

Source: http://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/social-innovation-fund/about-sif

This repurposing of philanthropy and the concentration of wealth in the hands of

so few with a narrow conception of how to make things better affects all areas of social

life. These principles apply in science and health where many of the same capitalists are

giving and directing research (Broad, 2014). (For example, Bill Gates has

donated/invested $10 billion for public health research.) As government funding for

health research diminishes the door is open for rich people to support research on

particular diseases, a ‘vertical’ funding strategy focusing on specific diseases that

bypasses health systems (which are complex and difficult to change) but demonstrates

higher return on investment. The Gates Foundation investment in vaccinations is a good

example of this. This strategy contributes to fragmentation in health care as nations try to

rationalize diseases and solutions favored by philanthrocapitalism, which may or may not

be a priority at the local level, with broader and more varied health needs.

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Volunteerism and philanthrocapitalism. In addition to utilizing private funds to

solve social problems, philanthrocapitalism relies on a citizenry’s valuing of charity and

faith for its success. Free or low paid labor is an important part of global

philanthrocapitalism, exemplified in volunteerism and voluntourism (whether this is

Médecins Sans Frontières providing medical aid in developing and war torn countries or

youth doing conservation work in Africa). Minimizing the cost of labor is essential to

capitalism’s success and this tenet holds within the philanthropic context of private

funding to solve social problems. The business plan depends on the exploitation of

workers for its sustainability, and this exploitation is made easy by appeal to what we see

as the basic charitability of human beings. In his analysis of post-Katrina New Orleans,

Adams (2013) illustrates this dependence.

The government, and the political process that is waged to ensure care for the

most vulnerable, becomes a partisan bystander—a sort of sleeping partner—to a

set of institutions that functions with federal support but by a logic that is

governed almost entirely by private-sector business and corporate principles,

where competition for resources and market accountability reign and where

hoards of unpaid or poorly paid laborers are now asked to do the work of

providing a safety net essentially for “free” or at rates far below minimum wage.

(p.168, emphasis added)

Social impact bonds. A variation on direct philanthropic giving has been the

recent phenomenon of social impact bonds (SIB), sometimes called Pay for Success

Bonds first used in the United Kingdom but now also in Australia and the U.S. This

strategy connects public sector social service programs with private donors, and return on

21

investment is contingent upon measurable social outcomes. The following scenario

illustrates how SIB might work, including the formulation of the social problem and what

success in alleviating the problem will look like, but especially cost savings to

governments.

Using social impact bonds to prevent child abuse and neglect

We proposed a $20 million social impact bond to prevent the children of 2,500

families from entering foster care over a period of five years, with a proposed

intervention that was termed “promising” but had not yet been determined to be a

“gold-standard” or a “top-tier” evidence-based intervention. In this situation, the

cost of foster care for the state in 2011 was $111 million and resulted in 2,700

placements. It is estimated that reducing the need by the level mentioned above

would save the state $54 million over five years. Depending on the terms of the

deal and its successful outcome, the investors would be repaid their capital

investment plus 5 percent or 10 percent of the state’s savings, for a return of $1.6

million or $4.3 million. (Center for American Progress, retrieved from

http://americanprogress.org/issues/open-

government/report/2014/03/03/85099/investing-for-success/).

Philanthropy has a long history and has always been political, the point is that

philanthropy has been repurposed in a global neoliberal context that transforms both the

nature of the public good and the particular ways in which financial backing of a very

small number of people privileges some public spheres, some recipients, and in only

some ways.

Evaluation and Neo-liberalism

22

I begin this final section of this chapter with some skepticism about current

evaluation practice’s ability to contribute to the alleviation of global poverty and

inequity, but will try to build an argument of hope nonetheless. My initial skepticism

follows from my argument thus far—the global reach of neo-liberalism changes pretty

much everything. Evaluation practice is, in large measure, also neo-liberalized.

Evaluation itself is a commodity and therefore conforms to the neoliberal

capitalist framework, and this is especially evident for external, consultant-based

evaluators who must market themselves, compete with other evaluators, and work in

cost-effective ways. Evaluation is a service bought and sold and while many evaluators

frame their practice within larger principles, like the American Evaluation Association

Guiding Principles, they are nonetheless responsive to those who pay for their services. I

believe it is difficult for most practicing evaluators to imagine that whoever has

commissioned the evaluation does not have the most say in what the evaluation questions

and preferred outcomes will be. Those with the money dominate the definition of what

matters, what counts as success and how that is demonstrated. The mode of operation in

much evaluation practice is top-down, what Scriven (1983) called the “managerial

ideology.” In the big picture, program/project managers serve their funders and

evaluators serve the program/project managers and/or their funders.

Much of the effort to alleviate social inequity and to alleviate poverty is managed

through philanthrocapitalism and therein is a direct impact on evaluation practice.5 This

5 It is important to note that within the Foundation world there is a great deal of teeth gnashing and dissatisfaction with the quality of evaluation and many call for improving both performance management and evaluation to assist foundations in what they do. Boris and Kopczynski Winkler (2013) summarize these issues and illustrate how

23

is reflected in a shift to simple solutions with measurable short-term outcomes to

illustrate success. For example, when we know a disease can be prevented with a vaccine

the solution seems simple and judging the success of a vaccine program is

straightforward—if the vaccine is given the disease will be prevented, so all you need to

do is document the rate of vaccination. This advice is given explicitly in a Gates

Foundation publication: focus on shorter term outcomes or what some evaluators would

even call outputs, rather than long term impact:

Tracking national reports of vaccination coverage as they are updated allows the

Vaccine Preventable Disease team to follow progress on important outcomes

(vaccine coverage). National estimates of child mortality (our target for impact)

are available less frequently but are useful to gauge progress toward targeted

mortality reductions.” (Twersky, Nelson & Ratcliffe, 2010, p. 9).

But many social issues are less clearly defined with no apparent solution and even

less clarity about what might be considered appropriate outcomes. For example, the issue

of population growth begs whether there is a problem at all but, if so, what is the

problem. Are there too many children? Are the wrong women having children? Are

women having children they don’t want? And, why? Is there a lack of education? birth

control? What is creating the problem? poverty? promiscuity? religion? These more

complex social issues are often central to issues of social equity and poverty reduction

and evaluation as the purveyor of metrics on instances will never be adequate, it must be

an evaluation that considers moral and value positions as well.

evaluation might better serve the needs of foundations, including for example the development of the Tools and Resources for Assessing Social Impact (TRASI).

24

In spite of heartfelt, well-argued, compelling conceptualizations of program

evaluation as democratizing (House & Howe, 1999), empowering (Fetterman, 2001),

inclusive and transforming (Mertens, 2009), and/or participatory (Cousins & Whitmore,

1998) evaluation practice often (usually) reflects an emphasis on efficiency,

effectiveness, and short-term measurable outcomes typically reflected in a logic model or

theory of change. Evaluation adopts ‘market speak’ and measures program success in

terms of profit; outcomes are conceptualized in economic terms; and individuals are to

blame for failure. Evaluators talk about a good program as one that is a good return on

investment or gives value for money, one that decreases costs (whether health, housing,

welfare) or results in savings, and is the best of its kind. And when programs don’t work

or fail it is due to service providers’ implementation infidelity or lack of willingness or

willpower on the part of beneficiaries. Even when evaluation is formative the role of

evaluation is “to make the case for further investments that allow them to scale up,

replicate programs, and reach more intended beneficiaries” (Boris & Kopczynski

Winkler, 2013, p. 73).

One way evaluation has been transformed within neoliberalism is the creation of

the state as evaluator. The state, through its power of surveillance and specialized

knowledge, assumes the role of providing evaluative information to the public about what

is good and right. This is sometimes confined to programs the government funds, such as

the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s system for evaluating and publicizing

whether government-funded programs work. George Bush’s Expect More

(http://www.expectmore.gov) claimed to tell the public which programs were performing

effectively and ineffectively. Other government resources reach beyond government-

25

funded programs to let the citizenry know what works. The best example of this is the

What Works Clearinghouse (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/) created in 2002 by the U.S.

Department of Education’s Institute for Educational Science “to provide educators,

policymakers, researchers, and the public with a central and trusted source of scientific

evidence of what works in education.” In both cases, the government assumes the role of

telling the public what the best choices are.

The government as evaluator role coheres with neoliberalism’s governance by

experts and Chomsky’s (2002) “spectator democracy,” a society in which a specialized

class of experts identifies what is good and manufactures consent for the populace.

Evaluators become technicians in this environment, carrying out the tasks associated with

managing, administering, and reporting performance data. For some evaluators this is a

positive sign of focus and unity, for others it is stepping away from ‘true’ evaluation—

that is, using multiple criteria, indicators of performance, with an eye to all consequences

of programs (Mathison & Muñoz, 2004). The evaluator as technician role includes the

application of what are accepted as appropriate evaluation methodologies at any given

time. Verdung (2010) describes waves of evaluation diffusion including a neoliberal

wave and more recently the evidence wave (a return to experimental designs) each

characterized by particular skills, techniques and models evaluators must master to be

perceived as competent.

A more detailed, careful analysis of the relationship between neo-liberalism and

evaluation than is provided here is required. What I have offered here is a simplification

(there is much diversity in evaluation practice) and a caricature (there is much nuance

that is not reflected here).

26

What Can Evaluators and Evaluation Do?

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact

that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion,

sacrifice, courage, kindness... And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't

have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of

presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all

that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. (Zinn, 2006, p. 270)

While evaluation that contributes positively to alleviating the suffering and

inequity faced by those in greatest need seems a Sisyphean task, thinking evaluatively

may be the key to whatever success we do have in fostering social justice. Even though I

have characterized current evaluation practice as neoliberalized it is important for

evaluation theorists and practitioners to imagine and try to implement evaluation

approaches that serve socially just ends. Evaluation practice that fosters participation,

encourages democratic deliberation, and looks at complex ecosystems are necessary and

should continue to be vigorously pursued, theoretically and practically. At the same time

I see a need for evaluators to struggle against global forces that insidiously affect all of us

in our personal and professional lives. In addition to this Sisyphean task (and it is good to

remember that Sisyphus came to see his struggle as worthy as both means and ends) there

is another role for evaluators, one that I see as a sociological project for evaluation and

one that operates in the realm of public discourse. Evaluators can do this by working at a

macro level, a level that focuses on whose interests are served and how through doing

27

independent and meta-evaluations, as well as bringing evaluation expertise to broad

social issues investigated independently and thoroughly. Instead of evaluation in service

of philanthrocapitalism, we could have evaluation in the service of the common good,

evaluation playing an independent role in civil society activism, and making a

contribution to civil society. I will conclude with three suggestions for evaluation: (1)

independent evaluations; (2) meta-evaluations of evaluation clearinghouses and

evaluation frameworks; and (3) social issue based evaluation inquiry by an international

academy of evaluators.

But first, a caveat. Evaluations done at any level in any context are necessarily

part of a discourse that involves complex values and moral imperatives. We can do

evaluation better and we can do it differently, but in the end the words of Paul Taylor and

William Shakespeare ring in my ear:

We cannot discover what ought to be the case by examining what is the case. We

must decide what ought to be the case. Paul Taylor

For there is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so. William

Shakespeare

Independent Evaluations

External evaluation is often characterized as more independent and likely to

provide a free from bias judgment about programs, interventions and strategies. Whether

this is true is much debated but at a minimum evaluations paid for by someone with a

vested interest in the program will be influenced by those interests. I am suggesting that

more independent evaluations, ones done with no monetary interest in the program

(although intellectual or moral interests) can provide information about the value and

28

consequences of programs and interventions. And so, independent funding of such

evaluations allows evaluators the opportunity to step outside the frames of neoliberalism,

to look at long and short-term outcomes, and investigate unplanned and unanticipated

outcomes. In the introduction I use the example of food security programs framed as

commodity exchange and point out that this framing of both the problem (hunger,

starvation) and the solution (food for work) is not value-free and is based on capitalism.

Independent evaluation that interrogates these programmatic foundations is a substantial

contribution to challenging taken-for-granted assumptions that define food security in

capitalist terms.

Using evaluation knowledge and practice to independently investigate the value

of programs allows evaluators to employ the forensic techniques and to step outside the

frameworks created by the closed and hierarchical system created through the

relationships of funders—programs—beneficiaries. Such independent evaluations might

most productively focus on those programs that are explicitly framed as alleviating

poverty and increasing social equity.

An example of what I am suggesting is an independent evaluation of Project

Shakti6, a project in India focused on creating an opportunity for women to earn a living

wage and independence doing meaningful work. This project is funded by Hindustan

Unilever Limited (a subsidiary of the Dutch company Unilever selling food, beverages,

cleaning and personal care products) that used a micro-entrepreneurship model to expand

markets for its products by having Indian women sell Unilever products in their rural

6 The term Shakti means “empowerment” or “power” and is also the name of the Hindu goddess responsible for feminine creation and change, illustrating the implicit appeal to female independence and strength, even spiritual status, as a marketer of HUL products.

29

communities. This strategy creates a market at the bottom of the pyramid by capitalizing

on rural women’s needs and desires to become economically independent and an

ancillary interest in improved personal hygiene and health. HUL defines both business

and social objectives summarized in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Project Shakti objectives that focus on what HUL refers to as doing well by

doing good, or increasing profits and simultaneously alleviating poverty. Source: HUL

website http://www.slideshare.net/karanshah101/project-shaktihuldistributionchannel

This strategy is used all over the world to sell cosmetics (Avon), jewelry (Stella &

Dot), and cookware (The Pampered Chef) to name just a few. This strategy is usually

directed to women, although Project Shakti defines a complementary role for men

(husbands and brothers) as delivery people for the products, especially when the range of

sales exceeds the distance women can or are willing to walk to sell the personal care

products.

HUL has done evaluations of Project Shakti that focus primarily on the

achievement of business objectives, and one might infer these are de facto the primary,

maybe only, objectives that really matter. An independent evaluation by Tandon and

30

Thekkudan (2007) affirms that rural Indian women do become salespeople for HUL and

expand the market and sales of its products. They also conclude there is little evidence

participation in Project Shakti empowers women and their participation provides them

with a low rate of return since less expensive products are available, the work is time

consuming and arduous, and takes them away from their family responsibilities.

Meta-evaluations of Evaluation Clearinghouses and Frameworks

Perhaps because there is increased demand for evaluation and more emphasis on

accountability there is a burgeoning number of enterprises that either will do the

evaluation for you and provide that information through clearinghouses or resource banks

of evaluation frameworks and tools that will streamline and facilitate evaluation practice.

In education, an example of an evaluation clearinghouse is the What Works

Clearinghouse (WWC). WWC’s identifies “studies that provide credible and reliable

evidence of the effectiveness of a given practice, program, or policy (referred to as

“interventions”), and disseminates summary information and reports on the WWC

website.” In health and human services in the U.S. there are research and evaluation

clearinghouses focusing on various topics, with a similar intention to the WWC. These

clearinghouses employ an evaluation process to identify other evaluation and research

studies to identify good interventions. It is these evaluations that evaluators might turn

their attention to by asking: are the criteria for including studies appropriate? are the

evaluation procedures more or less likely to systematically favour some interventions

over other? what political and social factors influence the evaluations? whose interests

are represented and served? (See, for example, Mathison’s (2009) analysis of Standard &

31

Poors’ School Matters (which no longer exists) and the U.S. Department of Education’s

What Works Clearinghouse.)

There are also an increasing number of resources, especially online, created to

facilitate evaluation practice. There is the previously mentioned Tools and Resources for

Assessing Social Impact (TRASI) a collaborative effort among foundations, government

related evaluation frameworks (like the often-cited CDC Framework for Program

Evaluation) and individual NGOs’ (like the United Way and the Kellogg Foundation)

advice on how to do evaluation. There is first a question of the efficacy of these resources

(does anyone pay attention and how are they used?) and also a need for evaluations of

these evaluation frameworks. What advice is being given on how evaluation should be

done and by whom and toward what ends? Whose interests are served and how? And are

there reasons to believe these frameworks are likely to help or hinder efforts to meets the

needs of those in the world most desperate for food, water, housing, health care, and

education?

One model for this idea is the National Education Policy Center’s Think Twice

Think Tank Project that provides academically sound reviews of think tank publications.

(http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank-review-project) This model is useful for its critical

investigation of publications that may influence public policy, and also because

overwhelmingly the reviews point to underlying neoliberal tenets, such as privatization.

Social Issue Based Evaluation Inquiry

Because evaluation is a service it is appropriately and necessarily done in specific

contexts. For evaluation as a discipline to have a more fulsome impact on the problems

evaluands are meant to alleviate, developing mechanisms to evaluate, investigate and

32

advise on how social issues are conceptualized and addressed is entirely within the scope

of evaluation. The ethical basis of evaluation could be exercised to invigorate

conversations about the good life, a necessary injection of moral reasoning in a world

otherwise dominated by a market mentality. Neoliberalism feeds on reluctance to

seriously consider what is good and right, privileging instead whatever is individually

valuable over what is in the common good.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Carnegie funded Commission of

Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland are two models for a

reinvigorated evaluative conversation. Picciotto’s (2005) discussion of policy coherence

for development wherein the “global enabling environment” becomes an essential lens

for multilateral evaluations also provides food for thought. House’s investigation of

evaluation in the pharmaceutical industry (2008) and the banking industry (this volume),

and Coryn’s (2008) investigation of peer review in science provide models for this idea.

An international academy of evaluators, a group of distinguished evaluators,

could provide advice on evaluation matters and commission investigations of big issues

like poverty reduction, food security, water, housing and so on. Such investigations

would specifically use evaluation strategies to examine human based ecosystems for the

broad and inter-connected effects of programming and intervention in seeking social

equity and involve a broad scope of expertise and many individuals. Such work by

evaluators could contribute directly to fostering deliberation, encouraging the

engagement of experts, civil society, and the polity in understanding the nature of efforts

to alleviate human suffering.

33

Such studies might expressly get beyond the win-win rhetoric promoted by

philanthrocapitalism and neoliberal capitalist and government joint ventures to

interrogate more deeply whether and how there may indeed be winners and losers.

Committees might ask questions like: Does philanthrocapitalism work in the best

interests of the world’s poor? Or do capitalists work to further their own causes and those

of other capitalists by creating new markets and targetable consumers? What is the

consequence of the emphasis on performance metrics? What are the effects of corporate

social responsibility? Can the goals of civil society and business be the same? What is

valued as an outcome? What is the efficacy and value of initiatives in specific contexts

for poverty reduction such as access to food, shelter, water, health care, education, and

civil liberties? What is the quality of evaluation in sectors such as finance, the judiciary,

and consumerism?

Conclusion

The current global neoliberalism defines and constrains what counts as a problem,

a solution and what counts as evidence of having alleviated a problem. This global

framework defines problems in market terms and encourages marking success by short-

term commodified and monetized outcomes that are often simplistic and fail to

investigate the complexity of the problem and the impact of interventions to solve those

problems. Evaluation theorists and practitioners work valiantly within this framework,

sometimes maintaining the status quo, sometimes pushing at the boundaries. I do not

diminish that work. Given the pervasiveness of neoliberalism, evaluators need also to

step outside that framework and challenge modern capitalism by investigating our own

34

practice and exercising evaluation know-how in service of the common good, not just the

service of those with power and money.

We would do well to heed Oscar Wilde’s words. We may try, “… to solve the

problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very

advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of

the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that

poverty will be impossible.” (1891, p.4, emphasis added).

35

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