Participatory evaluation is a process in which evaluation experts and members of a community who are not experts in evaluation evaluate community actions or projects jointly and on the same level. Participatory evaluation is a community development strategy. In this paper, we analyse the relationship between participatory evaluation and community development processes via three case studies in which participatory evaluation processes are instigated within community development plans. The results show that participatory evaluation is a useful working methodology not only for evaluating community development processes in a participatory way but also in generating learning that can contribute to empowering the people and communities involved in it