Show me your impact: Evaluating Transitional Justice in Contested Spaces

This paper discusses some of the most significant challenges and opportunities for evaluating the effects of programs in support of transitional justice – the field that addresses how post-conflict or post authoritarian societies deal with legacies of wide spread human rights violations. The discussion is empirically grounded in a case study that assesses the efforts of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and one of its Guatemalan partners to use Outcome Mapping to monitor and evaluate the effects of a museum exposition that is attempting to recast historic memory and challenge racist attitudes in post-conflict Guatemala. The case study experience indicates that there is no perfect evaluation model or approach for evaluating transitional justice programming – only choices to be made by commissioners of evaluation, evaluators, and those being evaluated. These are profoundly influenced by the extreme politics and moral values that define transitional justice settings as contested spaces in which calls to remember the tragic past must be balanced with aspirations to re-build a hopeful future.