Empowerment Evaluation in Participatory Management of Natural Resources

Extensive efforts to protect natural resources and environment have so far not been able to stop the process of losing these valuable resources. There is a great deal of consensus that the reason of development plans failure in this area is the disregard about various people and actors associated with natural resources. So understanding the conservation strategies and patterns and sustainable use of them is a fundamental necessity and is still a prominent theme of the rural development scientific association and local communities. To address this global dilemma, it’s been a long time that participatory management and empowering various users and stakeholders, and providing conditions for purposeful engagement of people in increase the quality and effectiveness of natural resource development programs has been emphasized. Empowerment is a process which individuals of community become aware of their needs and desires, gain a kind of confidence and self-reliance to meet those needs, and get the ability to fulfill their goals. This research, through a purposeful and analytical review, has described the evolution of different evaluation generations and the interrelationship of people’s empowerment and participation in enhancing programs efficiency. Then, as the main topic of the research, the concept and philosophy, principles and levels of the empowerment evaluation model have explained. According to the results, in the empowerment evaluation model of natural resource development plans, individual judgment and valuation toward how to run and socioeconomic impacts of the project is replaced by interaction, co-thinking and dialogue model among all stakeholders including designers, Executor, evaluator and host and target communities. In this model, program managers and evaluators behave not as decision makers but as facilitators and enablers. Therefore, implementing this model in natural resource management programs will help reduce conflicts of interest, converge human resources, and increase the actors’ motivation and interest in resource sustainability strategies. It also adjusts the direction of the advance program based on the audience's needs and desired. However, the empowerment evaluation model has also some shortcomings that are briefly mentioned.