ABSTRACT
The monitoring and evaluation of public policies has garnered increasing attention over recent years for two fundamentally different reasons. Most obviously, the scarcity of public resources characterising many economies since the 1997 financial crisis has provided a strong stimulus for public administrations to ask more searching questions around their policies. As such, policy-makers increasingly need to justify the impacts or ‘return on investment’ of the policies that they implement to ensure future funding in an era of austerity. Alongside these concrete pressures, however, there has been a second, less obvious force at work in pushing forward the evaluation agenda. This concerns the centrality of evaluation for processes of policy learning. While the two are of course related – evaluation for accountability purposes can also help us learn about policy – a policy learning imperative takes us in a different direction. In particular, in the systemic context in which today’s public policies are designed and implemented, the boundaries between policy-makers and policy recipients are increasingly fuzzy. 2 Thus it is not only the so-called policy-makers who are the focus of this policy learning but, rather, the whole collective of stakeholders in the policy process (Bennett and Howlett, 1992; Nauwelaers and Wintjes, 2008). In this context it is widely recognised that monitoring and evaluation can play a critical role in fostering learning as an integral and ongoing part of the policy process (Sanderson, 2002; Howlett et al., 2009; Aranguren et al., 2013; Aragón et al., 2014).
