Purposes and Use

Abstract

In Volume 3 (1) we published a keynote speech delivered by Eleanor Chelimsky at the December 1996 Conference of the UK Evaluation Society. Hellmut Eggers, an active member of the evaluation community in Europe, wrote to partly challenge some of Eleanor Chelimsky's arguments. Dr Eggers is no stranger to the problems of making evaluations purposeful and useful: he was for many years responsible for evaluation within the General Development Directorate of the European Commission. We are pleased to publish below both Hellmut Eggers' contribution and Eleanor Chelimsky's response. Readers who wish to take this debate further may want to re-read Eleanor Chelimsky's keynote address published in this journal and also consider a more recent article by the same author in the American Journal of Evaluation 19 (1) 1998.