Theme issue on music and arts in conflict transformationSince the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, large sums have been invested in
community theatre projects in Northern Ireland, in the interests of conflict
transformation and peace building. While this injection of funds has resulted in an
unprecedented level of applied theatre activity, opportunities to maximise learning
from this activity are being missed. It is generally assumed that project evaluation
is undertaken at least partly to assess the degree of success of projects against
important social objectives, with a view to learning what works, what does not, and
what might work in the future. However, three ethnographic case studies of
organisations delivering applied theatre projects in Northern Ireland indicate that
current processes used to evaluate such projects are both flawed and inadequate
for this purpose. Practitioners report that the administrative work involved in
applying for and justifying funding is onerous, burdensome, and occurs at the
expense of artistic activity. This is a very real concern when the time and effort
devoted to ‘filling out the forms’ does not ultimately result in useful evaluative
information. There are strong disincentives for organisations to report honestly on
their experiences of difficulties, or undesirable impacts of projects, and this
problem is not transcended by the use of external evaluators. Current evaluation
processes provide little opportunity to capture unexpected benefits of projects,
and small but significant successes which occur in the context of over-ambitious
objectives. Little or no attempt is made to assess long-term impacts of projects on
communities. Finally, official evaluation mechanisms fail to capture the reflective
practice and dialogic analysis of practitioners, which would richly inform future
projects. The authors argue that there is a need for clearer lines of communication,
and more opportunities for mutual learning, among stakeholders involved in
community development. In particular, greater involvement of the higher
education sector in partnership with government and non-government agencies
could yield significant benefits in terms of optimizing learning from applied theatre
project evaluations