ABSTRACT
There has been much soul searching in the social science academy concerning the impact of evaluation research on public policy. On the one hand this reflection has led to renewed attempts to strengthen the research methodology used (Pawson and Tilley 1997, Marshall and Rossman 1999; Armstrong et al. 2002) and, on the other hand, to question the relevance, and political nature, of evaluation research for policy makers (Blackman 1998; Davies et al. 2000; Flyvberg 2001; Sanderson 2002; Wilks-Heeg 2003). Recent methodological developments acknowledge the changing socio-political context within which public policy programmes and initiatives are inserted, including the ‘decentralization’ of public service delivery to public, private and third sector agencies and the simultaneous testing of new policy initiatives in the same spatial locality. This chapter is concerned with the evaluation of the cumulative impact of several spatially targeted policy initiatives in neighbourhoods that have been defined by the government as areas of multiple deprivation. The spatial dimension of area based initiatives raise several ontological and epistemological questions for evaluation including isolating the mechanisms, which produce the ‘additional’ anticipated impacts from the embedded interaction between goal-oriented actors and a complex web of sociopolitical structures existent in the area. The chapter also addresses a related theme that concerns the nature of ‘evidence’ for evidence-based policy-making.
