In recent decades, the use of evaluation has been one of the main concerns of both academics and practitioners, and there has been much controversy throughout the evaluation literature. Different perspectives of evaluation can determine the way evaluation findings are used and the contribution of evaluation to individual and organizational learning is conditioned by stakeholder participation. In this article, our main hypothesis is that stakeholder participation increases evaluation significance, ownership and utilization and, as a consequence, participatory evaluation approaches improve programme governance. We focus on the evaluation of the Rural Sustainable Development Plan in the Basque Country, a context that reveals a complex institutional network (at regional and local level) with a limited tradition of evaluation. To enhance the full scope of participatory evaluation, this article: (i) briefly reviews the theoretical discourse on evaluation utilization; (ii) describes the evaluation context (rural development policy and its governance); (iii) presents the evaluation model as applied to the mid‐term evaluation of the Basque Rural Sustainable Development Plan; and (iv) analyses the use of the evaluation findings and processes according to four dimensions, namely information generation, knowledge generation, orientated‐action utilization and orientated‐policy utilization. Finally, we provide guidance to improve knowledge about evaluation use, participation and good governance, which could be all considered as basic tools for solid institutionalization of sustainable development strategies. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment