Evidence Building And Evaluation In Government

Public managers, contractors, and grantees conducting evaluations for government operate in complex environment where policymakers and commissioners of evaluation expect different types of “evidence” and simultaneously employ different criteria in judging the quality of that evidence. This text provides a road map for evaluators doing business within or for government, and public managers who are expected to assess and use evidence generated by a large variety of evaluation approaches. The book provides checklists and how-to guidance to help students and other readers develop skills in important activities such as: assessing the quality of evidence claims; developing theories of change to guide the design and evaluation of programs and policies; developing learning agendas to bridge the gap between evidence producers and potential evidence users; and increasing the support of public leaders and executives in the generation and use of evidence to inform their decision-making. The authors include end-of-chapter exercises for readers to test their ability to apply the skills described.

This report analyses the skills and capacities governments need to strengthen evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) and identifies a range of possible interventions that are available to foster greater uptake of evidence. Increasing governments’ capacity for evidence-informed is a critical part of good public governance. However, an effective connection between the supply and the demand for evidence in the policy-making process remains elusive. This report offers concrete tools and a set of good practices for how the public sector can support senior officials, experts and advisors working at the political/administrative interface. This support entails investing in capability, opportunity and motivation and through behavioral changes. The report identifies a core skillset for EIPM at the individual level, including the capacity for understanding, obtaining, assessing, using, engaging with stakeholders, and applying evidence, which wasdeveloped in collaboration with the European Commission Joint Research Centre. It also identifies a set of capacities at the organisational level that can be put in place across the machinery of government, throughout the role of interventions, strategies and tools to strengthen these capacities. The report concludes with a set of recommendations to assist governments in building their capacities.

In the Research Handbook on Program Evaluation, an impressive range of authors take stock of the history and current standing of key issues and debates in the evaluation field. Examining current literature of program evaluation, the Research Handbook assesses the field's status in a post-pandemic and social justice-oriented world, examining today’s theoretical and practical concerns and proposing how they might be resolved by future innovations. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

One of the most divisive issues in the evaluation community has been the debate over which methodologies are to be considered adequate or commendable in addressing different evaluation questions in different settings. One form of this debate involved opposing camps of proponents of qualitative versus quantitative methods. A decade ago, there was some hope that the two sides of this debate, referred to as the paradigm war, were learning to respect each other. More recently, however, a federal agency priority for funding random assignment experimental studies has reignited the debate. This volume provides a space for a productive dialogue that, by identifying areas of agreement but also fundamental differences, will promote a more durable working consensus on the circumstances in which some methods are to be preferred over others. The chapter authors and discussants make clear that there are different types of evidence with which to inform this dialogue, including empirical findings of the impact of method choice on evaluation outcomes, the evidence contained in the wisdom of practice, and the results of critical analyses of the broader social impacts of method choice. The editors build on these contributions to suggest pragmatic policies for federal agencies, promoting both context-appropriate method choice and the importance of managing portfolios of evaluative research that maintain desired distributions of methodologies. This is the 113th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Evaluation, a publication of Jossey-Bass and the American Evaluation Association.

Monitoring and Evaluation Systems are a critical component of evidence-based policymaking. This book aims to help governments and civil society organizations design, implement and use M and E information drawing from best practice experiences.

Prior to 1995, there were fewer than half a dozen regional and national evaluation organizations around the world. Today there are more than fifty, attesting to a growing interest in the practice of program evaluation internationally. Many of these new organizations have undertaken efforts to develop their own standards or to modify existing sets--most typically, the Program Evaluation Standards of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation--for use in their own cultural context. Following two introductory chapters, one a conceptual overview and the second a history of the development and revisions of the Program Evaluation Standards, this issue documents standards development efforts in three different settings: Western Europe, Africa, and Australasia. In addition, because nongovernmental organizations and governments have entered the standard-setting business, other chapters describe standards development activities by the European Commission and CARE International. The content points to the challenge of formalizing standards for program evaluation given cross-cultural differences in values and to the continuing challenges related to implementing voluntary standards. This is the 104th issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Evaluation.

This report analyses the skills and capacities governments need to strengthen evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) and identifies a range of possible interventions that are available to foster greater uptake of evidence. Increasing governments' capacity for evidence-informed is a critical part of good public governance. However, an effective connection between the supply and the demand for evidence in the policy-making process remains elusive. This report offers concrete tools and a set of good practices for how the public sector can support senior officials, experts and advisors working at the political/administrative interface. This support entails investing in capability, opportunity and motivation and through behavioral changes. The report identifies a core skillset for EIPM at the individual level, including the capacity for understanding, obtaining, assessing, using, engaging with stakeholders, and applying evidence, which wasdeveloped in collaboration with the European Commission Joint Research Centre. It also identifies a set of capacities at the organisational level that can be put in place across the machinery of government, throughout the role of interventions, strategies and tools to strengthen these capacities. The report concludes with a set of recommendations to assist governments in building their capacities.

Evaluation in the Post-Truth World explores the relationship between the nature of evaluative knowledge, the increasing demand in decision-making for evaluation and other forms of research evidence, and the post-truth phenomena of antiscience sentiments combined with illiberal tendencies of the present day. Rather than offer a checklist on how to deal with post-truth, the experts found herein wish to raise awareness and reflection throughout policy circles on the factors that influence our assessment and policy-related work in such a challenging environment. Journeying alongside the editor and contributors, readers benefit from three guiding questions to help identify specific challenges but tools to deal with such challenges: How are policy problems conceptualized in the current political climate? What is the relationship between expertise and decision-making in today’s political circumstances? How complex has evaluation become as a social practice? Evaluation in the Post-Truth World will benefit evaluation practitioners at the program and project levels, as well as policy analysts and scholars interested in applications of evaluation in the public policy domain.