Empowerment And Regulation: Application Of Empowerment Evaluation In Social Service Programs

In the new era of solid promotion of shared prosperity,China has comprehensively promoted the purchase of social service programs by the government as an effective means of promoting the growth of social organizations and innovating the supply of quality public services.Social organizations,as program contractors,can work with the government to optimize public services collection and improve resource allocation efficiency.As government purchases continue to increase,the government and the public are placing higher demands on the efficiency and credibility of social organization program implementation.Although third-party evaluation can improve the process of monitoring and evaluating the performance of social service programs,its neutrality and non-involvement make it challenging to help build the capacity of the evaluated parties to a certain extent.This study seeks a breakthrough from the perspective of the social work profession and introduces empowerment evaluation as a new evaluation method to guide evaluation practice.Based on the theoretical characteristics of empowerment evaluation,an analytical framework of social service program evaluation is developed from four dimensions: evaluation objectives,evaluation subjects,evaluation criteria,and evaluation procedures.The results show that empowerment evaluation can enhance the self-determination of social workers,promote the development of social organizations and service programs in the direction of standardization and professionalization,and promote "evaluation for construction" and "evaluation for development." The results show that the empowerment evaluation practice can enhance the "self-determination" ability of social workers,and promote the development of social organizations and service programs in the direction of standardization and professionalization,and facilitate the achievement of the goals of "advancing the development with evaluation" and "promoting the efficiency with evaluation".Therefore,this study proposes two optimization aspects better to realize the dual functions of empowerment evaluation and supervision.The first is to introduce an integrationist perspective and promoting an evaluation approach that combines internal and external elements.Emphasizing process and outcome to foster and stimulate a sense of "self-determination" among participating social organizations and promote the formation of learning social organizations.The second is to cultivate a plurality of evaluation subjects and give equal rights of participation to all stakeholders through cooperative participation,thus forming a multi-perspective monitoring mechanism for the program and genuinely achieving complete process monitoring and multi-faceted accountability.