Evaluation

In response to an increasing demand for public sector accountability, many government agencies have sought to develop their internal evaluation capabilities. Often these efforts have focused on increasing the capacity to supply credible evaluations, yet addressing demand is just as important. This article focuses on a government agency and tracks its five-year journey towards developing such a capability. It documents contextual matters, drivers for change, the actions taken by the agency, and its response to emergent challenges during four phases. Based on feedback from project staff and managers and those involved in the capability development project, it offers seven recommendations. These are: start small and grow evaluation; address both supply and demand; work top-down and bottom-up simultaneously; use a theory of change behaviour; develop a common evaluation framework, including a generic programme theory; build knowledge of what works within the agency's context; and systematically and visibly evaluate each stage.

This article has a twofold agenda. First, it examines lessons from qualitative evaluative research on a community intervention in stroke rehabilitation. Second, it focuses on more general, fundamental questions in evaluation, particularly in healthcare. This involves addressing the domination of a relatively narrow range of positivist research approaches in much medical research and how this limits understanding. While in the medical field randomized controlled trials are regarded as the gold standard, evaluations that rely on quantitative methods and measuring outcomes alone are inadequate. General themes addressed include: the relative neglect of nonpositivist, qualitative and process-orientated evaluation; the recognition of key distinctions in healthcare evaluation research; the need for greater attention to mixed and combined methods in evaluation; and the recognition of barriers to and key challenges in developing combined methods. This agenda suggests a need for more pluralist mentalities in research funding, evaluation and publication.

How to create and transfer knowledge in organizations is the subject of a rich and stimulating discourse among academics and practitioners. This article focuses on a still relatively unexplored aspect of this issue: the evaluation of the outcomes of programmes designed to stimulate the creation and transfer of knowledge in corporations (sometimes called Knowledge Management [KM] programmes). This is done by taking the concept of organizational goals for development of knowledge, and viewing their relation to evaluation against the backdrop of epistemological concerns. It is argued that the evaluation of programmes for the creation and transfer of knowledge is a complex task for a number of reasons, one of the most important of which is the constitutive character of knowledge itself. As a conclusion the article recommends a constructivist and goal-free framework for KM-programme evaluation, which has the capacity to sensitize the organization to the transformative nature of KM. The article concludes with a number of suggestions as to how such evaluations may be carried out.

This article argues that economists have a potentially valuable contribution to make to evaluation in the social welfare field, provided they are willing to embrace a more flexible and eclectic approach to economic evaluation. It contrasts the perspectives of mainstream economists and other evaluators working in this field, which often appear to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. This may explain why the role of economists often seems to be marginalized - the ends don't meet. Although different approaches to evaluation are to some extent complementary, the article argues that economists can learn from other perspectives on evaluation and should consider adapting or building on more conventional approaches to economic evaluation, where appropriate. This would help to improve the validity and generalizability of their results and would also facilitate more co-operative working with evaluators from other disciplines - helping to make ends meet.

An evaluation project - ongoing for more than three years - will be used to show that shifts of authority between stakeholders are a major criterion for determining the evaluation process. Utilization, process learning, knowledge transfer, evaluative thinking, emancipation and democratization have become increasingly important facets of the evaluative process in participatory evaluations. This implies that greater authority to make decisions and to control the evaluation process has shifted towards the participants. Therefore, the focus is to ascertain who decides the characteristics of the evaluation in the course of its process. This article will look at the effectiveness of an evaluation and the utilization of evaluation results within a charitable organization. The authors analyse to what extent each of the 200 individual employees or the 23 teams within the organization have an impact on, and assume responsibility for, decisions that are crucial to them.