ABSTRACT
Monitoring policies and policy strategies refers to an organized set of activities encompassing (i) the iterative collection and elaboration of information on the direction and evolution of socio-economic phenomena and the delivery of policy measures, and (ii) its use in the decision-making process for adjusting the course of policy actions. The presence and correct functioning of a monitoring mechanism represents a necessary element in order to create ‘sustainable policy cycles’ and to guarantee the improvement and ‘evolvability’ – the ability to produce more appropriate responses to challenges than any yet existing, borrowing from evolutionary science (Altenberg, 1994, p. 47) – of policy strategies, public programmes and projects through experimentation, learning and self-correction (Sabel and Zeitlin, 2008; 2012).
