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This article develops a framework for enhancing understanding and exploring both how power manifests in the evaluation process, and the power of evaluation in relation to public policy and democratic governance. Power is conceived as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon that manifests, permeates, and affects evaluation in many ways. The article demonstrates how the framework can be applied to an evaluation of a Swedish teacher-training program. The tentative analysis shows how the commissioner’s power-over the evaluators becomes evident when it cannot induce the evaluators to do what it wants them to do and manifests itself as constitutive power when, for example, helping shape the notion of what valid knowledge is. The power of the evaluation manifests itself as supporting key policy and governance functions.

Recently, several authors have called for a critical assessment of the normative dimensions of evaluation practice. This article responds to this call by demonstrating how evaluation practice can be enriched through deliberate engagement with care ethics. Care ethics has a relational and practice view of morality and places caring relationships and responsibilities at the forefront of our being in the world. We will demonstrate how care ethics, in particular Joan Tronto’s moral-political theory of democratic caring, can help evaluators to reshape our way of working by placing caring and relationality at the centre of our evaluative work. Care ethics as a normative orientation for evaluation stretches beyond professional codes of conduct, and rule- or principled-based behaviour. It is part of everything we do or not do, how we interact with others, and what kinds of relationships we forge in our practice. This is illustrated with two examples: a democratic evaluation of a programme for refugee children in Sweden; and a responsive evaluation of a programme for neighbours of people with an intellectual disability in The Netherlands. Both examples show that a caring ethos offers a promising pathway to address the larger political, public issues of our times through the interrogation of un-caring practices. We conclude a caring ethos can help evaluators to strengthen a caring society that builds on people’s deeply felt need to care, to relate, and to connect within and across communities.

This article explores how three evaluation systems in eldercare governance, two national and one local, operate and interact at the municipal, administrative, and service levels in a Swedish municipality. The case study focuses on the three systems’ contributions to accountability and to improving eldercare quality. It is based on multiple sources, including 28 interviews with local key actors involved in local eldercare governance, and the results derive from a directed content analysis guided by four research questions.

The study demonstrates that the three evaluation systems support accountability and quality improvement in different ways and have different consequences for local actors. The systems create multiple accountability problems and have multiple constitutive effects, for example, creating different notions of what quality in eldercare means. The systems’ contributions to improving eldercare quality differed: the net effect of the two national systems was negative, whereas the local system has helped improve eldercare quality without any identified negative effects so far.

The article broadens our theoretical understanding and knowledge of regulatory mechanisms in eldercare governance. It has significance for eldercare policy by finding that policymakers and service providers must be aware of and manage multiple evaluation systems and accountability problems. Its implication for eldercare practice is that local actors must build evaluation capacity to manage existing evaluation systems in order to improve their own practices.