Recent developments in the area of policy evaluation have focused on new notions of process and use or, notably, “influence.” But this debate among evaluators on how evaluations are used has been essentially a closed one—evaluators talking only among themselves. The debate has gone on seemingly oblivious to fundamental changes in the intellectual landscape of public management, organizational theory, information technology, and knowledge management. New realities demand a different approach toward evaluation.
The current era is characterized by the emergence of an increasingly global set of pressures for governments to perform effectively, not just efficiently, and to demonstrate that their performance is producing desired results. Information technology allows enormous quantities of information to be stored, sorted, analyzed, and made available at little or no cost. The result for those in the evaluation community is that, while individual evaluations are still conducted and reported upon, they are a rapidly diminishing source of information. In the new environment, ever accelerating political and organizational demands and expectations are reframing thinking about the definition of what, fundamentally, constitutes evaluation and what we understand as its applications.
In this twelfth volume in the Comparative Policy Evaluation series, authors from fourteen nations address these issues from multiple vantage points. This latest volume in the series is an essential tool for policymakers, government officials, and scholars interested in the contemporary status of evaluation.
Ray C. Rist is a senior evaluation officer in the World Bank. He has served as university professor at The Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, and George Washington University. His career has included fifteen years in the U.S. government in both the Executive and Legislative branches. He has authored, edited, or co-edited twenty-four books and written over 125 articles. Nicoletta Stame teaches social policy at the University “La Sapienza,” Rome. She was a co-founder and first president of the Italian Evaluation Association. Her previous publications include L’esperienza della valutazione.
"This book challenges the evaluation community to catch up with emerging developments in diverse information flows, organizational learning, data-based decision-making, adaptive management, and knowledge generation. The stream metaphor offers new opportunities for understanding the roles evaluators can play in making evaluation useful and meaningful."--Michael Quinn Patton, Author, Utilization-Focused Evaluation
"This publication arrives at a crucial time for the evaluation community and brings concepts and practices which are relevant to today's problems. Contemporary evaluation is facing two momentuous challenges. Firstly, some proponents of evidence based public policies place their faith first and foremost in monitoring systems rather than evaluations. In their view, monitoring promises direct information on what is happening, whereas traditional evaluation will usually tell you what happened years later - too late to act upon. Secondly, evaluation is supposed to play a role in reporting on results at the highest levels. Tax payers, parliaments and boards are no longer interested whether a specific intervention in Outer Baldonia produced the expected results, but whether policies achieve their highest aim, whether organizations make a difference and whether the world in general is better off as a result.
These two challenges seem contradictory: the first one asking for more immediate information rather than ex post evaluations, the second asking for broader and more meaningful research into longer term impacts. However, both in theory and in practice evaluators are currently trying to address these challenges. This publication comes timely with concepts and visions from theoretical perspectives combined with overviews of recent developments in some of the countries that are on the frontier of results based management, evidence based policies and integrating evaluative evidence and monitoring systems in their governance and public management. It provides a rich source of information and inspiration." --Rob D. van den Berg, Director of Evaluation, Global Environment Facility
