Lapses, Infidelities, and Creative Adaptations: Lessons from Evaluation of a Participatory Market Development Approach in the Andes1

Introduction Participatory approaches are often recommended to improve the efficiency and sustainability of international development programs or to contribute to local capacity development and empowerment (World Bank 1996; Chambers 2010). Participatory approaches have a long history in agricultural research and development (R&D), beginning with croppingand farmingsystems research in the 1970s and evolving to a broad array of participatory approaches for rural assessment, plant breeding, natural-resource management, and market-chain development (Collinson 2000; Scoones and Thompson 2009; Devaux et al. 2009). Despite the extensive interest in and experimentation with participatory approaches over nearly a half-century, few of these approaches have been systematically evaluated and there is little evidence of their effectiveness and benefits (Martin 2009, 276; Johnson, Lilja, and Ashby 2003, 288). Evaluators of participatory approaches have grappled with numerous challenges, including the broad range of expected project impacts, the large number of stakeholders with often differing interests, and the limited direct influence of evaluation results on funding decisions (Lilja and Dixon 2008a, 2008b). In this chapter, we address three even more fundamental methodological challenges to the evaluation of participatory approaches: the commonly