Practising Political Care Ethics: Can Responsive Evaluation Foster Democratic Care?

Abstract

This paper examines if and how responsive evaluation as a deliberative approach can serve as a guide for a politically oriented care ethics. A political care ethics puts the assignment of responsibilities and the inclusion of multiple perspectives of people at the centre of care. It honours the expressive-collaborative nature of care practices. It is responsive to political positions of vulnerability, fragility and resilience of those whom it concerns. From this, the interest in deliberative approaches is growing. Deliberative approaches aim to elicit, articulate and connect the voices of people with policy. Responsive evaluation is an empirical approach helpful to fostering mutual understanding, deliberation and inclusion. It aims to carefully understand perspectives of a variety of people and facilitate a dialogue between people on their experiences with a caring practice. The paper explores how responsive evaluators pay specific attention to asymmetric power relations and the way conflicts are handled by a case example. The case example focuses on the inclusion of professionals’ perspectives and illustrates that responsive evaluators actively reflect upon, energize and guide asymmetries in practices. This occurs by articulating and including multiple voices, searching for common ground, while simultaneously respecting differences. The paper concludes by discussing how responsive evaluation can be used to inform care ethics as a political ethics and how responsive evaluation may be enriched by care ethics itself.

Keywords:

• political care ethics
• deliberation
• responsive evaluation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor Bob Stake for his helpful suggestions on improving the paper and the inspiring conversations we have been fortunate to have. We are grateful to Dr Inge van Nistelrooij for her supporting comments on the ethics of care sections of this paper. We look forward to continue working with them!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Examples of outcome parameters include the number of cases; the duration of a case and the participants involved. Examples of process parameters were perceived commitment, quality of the cooperation between participants (professionals and sometimes also clients), clarity of role (Visse, Widdershoven, and Abma 2012a).