Short Abstract

Evaluation use is likely to change as new policy scenarios, associated with crisis management, regulation and planetary boundaries succeed those associated with 'social betterment' and growth. This will transform how evaluation 'evidence' is used across different policy making settings.

Description

Evaluation use and utilisation is key to the sub-theme ‘evaluation into action’. ‘Utilisation’ paradigms usually make a number of assumptions. For example that the main ‘end users’ of public policy evaluations are located in core policy communities mainly at a national level; that use consists of modifying policies and programmes in the light of new evidence and understanding; and that ‘actions’ informed by evaluation will be knowable by the time evaluations take place. These assumptions have been shaped by policy scenarios such as social welfare and betterment, the state that enables innovation; and ongoing public management reform – all of which are foundational to ‘evidence-based policy’. These scenarios are sometimes questioned but only at the margins. For example the policy community is sometimes expanded to include stakeholders, partners and lead-actors in civil society/industry. However, this expansion of the policy community often under the label of governance mainly serves to recruit non-policy actors into a policy-led agenda not to question or discover or implement new policy priorities. Similarly evaluation informed ‘action’ may not be about changing policy but rather be about sense-making, ‘challenge’, collaborative learning - quite tangential to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of policy delivery. As challenging is that policy related evidence may only inform ‘actions’ some time in the future well after an evaluations begin to generate relevant information or insights.

I’m arguing that we need to distinguish more carefully what we mean by policy ‘action’ associated with evaluation as new policy scenarios associated with climate change, planetary boundaries more generally and crisis management succeed those associated with social betterment based on limitless 'growth’ and expanding welfare. Of course the latter will continue but are likely to become less ambitious, emphasising more conflict management and regulation rather than ‘social betterment’. At the same time decentralised policy scenarios that rely on new modes of participation (policy labs, citizen science, citizen juries, story-telling, participatory engagement etc.) open up different connections between evidence, use and action. They can be used to enable stakeholders, social groups and citizens more generally to shape and engage with de-centralised and devolved policies; and in extremis to help understand, make sense of and even become reconciled to crises, shocks and privations. Patterns of evidence able to inform public action in emergent policy scenarios only becomes visible over extended timescales – hence the interest by many evaluators in Foresight. This plus a switch to monitoring, trend analysis, AI assisted sampling of population or geospatial data, and Observatories all point in the same direction. One in which the identification of ‘policy users’ and ‘policy actions’ only clarifies slowly. and 'usage' might be better understood as 'stewardship' in circumstances where the stewards may not yet be identified.