The Growing Role of Evaluation in Parliaments: Holding Governments Accountable (original) (raw)
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2006
The general theme around this paper is to discuss possibilities to enhance the contribution that evaluation can make to foster democratic governance. I will address a very small aspect of this big issue. My perspective will be on evaluation as a profession and a community which is on the way to establishing its position in modern democracies, supported by making explicit its own standards for good evaluation practice.
The Politicisation of Evaluation: Constructing and Contesting EU Policy Performance
Politische Vierteljahresschrift
Although systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy “effectiveness” (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and fi...
The Evaluation of Politics and the Politics of Evaluation
2012
Few people would want to argue against the 'results' and 'value for money' agenda that now dominates the current fashions in evaluation and monitoring. But are we clear about what is meant by 'value'? Value for whom? And value over what period? Are all 'results' amenable to standard methods of evaluation? And how does one evaluate results that are intended or expected to mature gradually or to occur many years in the future? Is that too risky? Should we only promote programmes and projects that intend to deliver, and hence that can be measured in terms of, immediate or short-term outcomes? Does that mean that donor concerns for embedding the political institutions of accountability, transparency, participation or inclusion, for instance - that always take a long time to mature - should be abandoned? Or just assessed 'in bits'? Or in different ways? This new DLP paper by Chris Roche and Linda Kelly explores these issues, drawing heavily on a DLP specialist evaluation workshop held in Canberra in October 2011. The authors identify the wide range of objectives that are commonly pursued by different programmes and projects, looking in particular at those that are increasingly beginning to 'think and work politically'. In these cases anticipated changes are likely to take time, intermediate steps may be hard to discern, and traditional or single-method evaluation approaches may fall short of providing a full and long-term picture of 'value' or 'results'. They argue, therefore, that it is now vital for a 'mixed methods' approach to be adopted to match this growing range of objectives, and to provide a better understanding of the long-term political processes that underpin all inclusive growth stories. A second paper, exploring the politics of evaluation in more detail will follow later in 2012.
Over the years, there has been a proliferation of initiatives, methods and tools for evaluation in the European Union (EU). In 2015, the Commission produced a set of integrated guidelines and a single toolbox for better regulation, with the ambitious aim of closing the policy cycle, that is, to draw on evaluation methods systematically from the stage of policy formulation to (a) the end of a project or (b) the moment of ex-post regulatory review. The idea of ‘closing the policy cycle’ is intuitively attractive, but in practice it raises issues of who is exercising control and oversight of different evaluation approaches and tools inside the Commission, the relationship between the Member States and the Commission, and the inter-institutional relations that define power within ‘better regulation’. We examine across time the emergence of different types of evaluation (ex ante and ex post, regulatory evaluations and more traditional approaches to expenditure evaluation) as ‘solutions’, and associate them to problems. We find that the goal of closing the policy cycle is a very tall order for the Commission and the EU more generally, given the historical development of different problems-solutions combinations. The rise of ‘better regulation’ provides the ideational cement for this re-configuration of evaluation ‘to close the policy cycle’ but there are critical issues with tools, methods and scope of evaluation. In the end, today the pieces do not fall into place and the puzzle of ‘evaluation for whom and for what purposes’ has not been solved yet. This less-than-Cartesian puzzle, with its odd de-coupled pieces of different evaluations is not efficient if the problem is to close the policy cycle. But ambiguity is organizationally acceptable if the problem is to generate local power equilibria that can be exploited within the Commission and externally. Evaluation, in fact, is also a frame of reference and praxis where the Member States, the Sec Gen, the DGs of the Commission, the European Parliament test and constantly re-define the question of who has control over EU policy.
Evaluation use in evaluation systems - the case of the European Commission
Evaluation, 2014
This article investigates the European Union’s evaluation system and its conduciveness to evaluation use. Taking the European Commission’s LIFE programme as its case, the article makes an empirical contribution to an emerging focus in the literature on the importance of organization and institutions when analyzing evaluation use. By focusing on the European Union’s evaluation system the article finds that evaluation use mainly takes place in the European Commission and less so in the European Parliament and the European Council. The main explanatory factors enabling evaluation use relate to the system’s formalization of evaluation implementation and use; these factors ensure evaluation quality, timeliness and capacity in the Commission. At the same time, however, the system’s formalization also impedes evaluation use, reducing the direct influence of evaluations on policy-making and effectively ‘de-politicizing’ programme evaluations and largely limiting their use to the level of pr...
Legislative Evaluation as Alternative Democratic Engagement
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This article grapples with the role that legislative evaluation can fulfill as a tool to reinforce the democratic dimension of public decision-making in western liberal democracies. The investigation started from the observation that China’s National People’s Congress called for legislative evaluation as a tool to develop democracy. Evaluation was consequently described as “alternative” democratic engagement. The investigation then proceeds to answer the question whether there might be a role for alternative forms of democratic engagement in liberal democracies as well, given the fact that electoral and other accountability mechanisms have already been institutionalized. The answer is affirmative, because of the numerous challenges that contemporary democracies face in addition to a string of fundamental developments that are summarized as the shift from government to governance. Now assuming that there is a role for alternative democratic engagement, an ensuing question relates to ...
2004
The paper presents the changing role of evaluation for public policies and the increasing importance of comprehensive evaluation systems for more effective and learning public institutions. In this context, evaluation systems are becoming an essential element of governance and democratic processes. Within the framework of the current EU Structural Policy and its new challenges (enlargement, new priorities, regional policy paradigm), the creation and the development of evaluation capacities and comprehensive evaluation systems becomes increasingly an instrument for organizational learning and policy improvement. In this context, the development of evaluation systems is not only fundamental for the new member states, but also for countries with a poor evaluation culture or a fragmented evaluation system. However, evaluation still lacks the necessary resources and infrastructure to become an accepted and integrated governance tool, despite the growth of the European Evaluation Communit...
Why Government Finds It Hard to Conduct Evaluations
The paper examines reasons why government may find it hard to conduct evaluations. The paper argues that despite the much-touted evidence based policy making which signals traditional notions of rationality in policy making and 'implies a central role for social research and evaluation in policy-making processes', government generally finds it difficult to conduct evaluation. The reasons for this, the paper identified to include-the political system which is not structured for rational decision making, interference form political officials and bureaucrats, the symbolic nature and character of some policies and programmes, pressure on policy makers to develop, obtain parliamentary approval for and implement policies, challenges with determining the goals of policies/programmes, lack of an evaluation culture amongst policymakers and decision takers in the public service, lack of opportunity for sharing good practice experience and lessons learned, inadequate budget provisions for evaluation of policies, programmes and projects as well as lack of effective feedback loops from street level bureaucrats.
Assessing the policy impact of Parliament: Methodological challenges and possible future approaches
paper for the PSA Legislative Studies …, 2009
Both academic and public discourse tends to dismiss the British parliament as a relatively marginal policy actor. Whilst parliament is clearly highly visible, and in many ways central to politics, it has long been seen as weak. Indeed, given for example that government legislation is defeated rarely in the House of Commons (including only two occasions in the past 12 years), some view it as having practically no policy influence at all. There are two difficulties with this analysis, however. First, it was probably never true. Much of parliament's influence is subtle, largely invisible, and frequently even immeasurable. An analysis based on crude indicators is therefore likely to reach incorrect conclusions. Second, even if such allegations had some truth in the past, there are clear signs that parliament is becoming more assertive -for example through increased rebelliousness in the Commons and greater resistance from the Lords. The time is ripe, therefore, for a reassessment of parliament's role in the policy process. This paper is an exploratory piece, which it is hoped will be the first output from a major programme of research in this area. It asks what are the challenges to measuring parliament's impact on policy, and what approaches might be taken to conducting such an assessment. It is based on a wide literature review of parliamentary policy impact, both in Britain and in other settings. It defines parliamentary impact broadly, looking at the legislative process, committees of different kinds, and different parliamentary actors. It identifies a range of possible methods, but also a number of significant gaps. The paper's purpose is to spark discussion, and hopefully interest, in the proposed future project and how it should proceed.