Developing Participatory Evaluations for Countering Violent Extremism .

This concept paper outlines emerging findings on the potential of participatory, community-based approaches to the research, analysis, monitoring and evaluation of countering violent extremism (CVE).

The paper defines participatory evaluation of CVE as a process by which an implementer or researcher engages various stakeholders to design some of the indicators that they will use as proxy indicators to measure violent extremism. Given cross-contextual variation of violent extremism (VE) dynamics, a participatory approach could clear practical value. How local people experience extremist violence, and how they respond to changing conditions (good or bad), should inform how CVE projects are designed and assessed. This paper discusses a grassroots approach not as a replacement for methodologies currently in use, but as a valuable corollary to CVE research and learning. This paper concludes by outlining a model for a participatory research approach, and includes a list of examples of indicators developed through a participatory process.