Evaluation is at the heart of efforts to make projects, programs, and policies more effective. In fields ranging from international development cooperation to social policy to disease eradication, the question of whether an intervention "works" as intended preoccupies policymakers, academics, bureaucrats, and citizens. The EU requires that major spending programs and pieces of legislation be evaluated periodically using approaches outlined in a Better Regulation Toolbox. The OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations have created evaluation guidelines and resources en masse. There is even a separate UN inter-agency network (the United Nations Evaluation Group, UNEG) that brings together the evaluation units of the UN system. Evaluation is an essential element of accountability and is based on a set of core principles, concepts and systematic approaches that are relatively easy to understand but more difficult to apply in practice, often involving specialized experts, units and/or consultancies.
Policy evaluation can be conducted ex-post (after the intervention), as an interim evaluation (during the intervention), and ex-ante (before an intervention, now mostly referred to as impact assessment). This course will focus on the practice of ex-post and interim evaluation in terms of concepts, methods and practical challenges (impact assessment will be the subject of a later course). We will discuss the historical background of the evaluation concept and understand common approaches such as the Logical Framework Approach (LFA) and Intervention Logic (IL), which are used to design and subsequently evaluate projects as part of the Project Cycle Management (PCM). Based on group exercises, we will apply evaluation criteria and develop evaluation questions, design an evaluation framework and approach, including a stakeholder consultation strategy, and consider qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods as part of Better Regulation. In this course we will also look at key guidelines from the EU, UK and US and discuss the ethics of evaluation and its use (and abuse) in the policy cycle.
By the end of the course, students taking the course will:
Understand the origin and practice of the concept of evaluation and how to apply evaluation criteria such as effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, coherence, and added value.
Be able to develop the intervention logic of a project or a piece of legislation, from the definition of the problem to the inputs and outputs of the intervention and the expected results/impacts.
Gain insight into the most common evaluation methods, such as literature reviews, interviews, stakeholder surveys, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses.
Develop an evaluation methodology to assess a policy intervention in group exercises.
Gain insight into budgeting for an evaluation.
Understand the ethics of commissioning and conducting evaluations and potential pitfalls.
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