ABSTRACT
Different proponents adopted rather different versions but the critical element in ‘evaluating’ the alternatives clearly lay with cost benefit or cost effectiveness studies. Typical instructions for the new systems analysts had been: select alternatives, collect data, build explanatory models, weigh cost against effectiveness. If the cost-effectiveness approach had proved difficult to apply to programs with agreed objectives it proved even less useful where the objectives turned out to be many and confused. Although some accounts of the development of Federal evaluation policy would lead one to believe that it began with the poverty programs of the mid 1960s there are really two quite distinct strands to the history. There has been a good deal of criticism of the variable and poor quality of many of the evaluation studies carried out for Federal agencies and its lack of relevance or use to policy-makers and administrators at different levels.
