Monitoring and evaluating participation: what are the indicators and what tools work?

There is a lot of rhetoric around participation and I am most familiar with that of international development organisations such as INGO's the UN, the world banks etc. What I am very interested in is how they are pulling that rhetoric into actual programming, how they are evaluating it and what tools they are using. I am familiar with the participation tool Hear by Right. I have created tools myself and adapted others tools (eg evaluators cookbook). Like to hook up and discuss this with other experts.  I want to know how much we know about what we are doing,  how it is working and the impact it has made.