Government and Evaluation

Government and Evaluation: Origins

The fact that evaluation activities are normally carried out by governments and not parliaments does not explain why some countries have more evaluation activities or started earlier than others. This is not an easy question to answer. A comparison of evaluation activities in eight countries reveals a first and second wave of countries according to degree of maturity in evaluation. The first wave countries, for example, the United States, Canada, and Sweden, were characterized by an interest in evaluation as such. One of the common features of these early pioneers was that they shared stable institutions with access to basic information about the state of things; for example, institutions that registered the development of important welfare indicators. This coincided with an interest in empirical evidence for the decision-making process. Evaluation was supposed to serve as an information source within a rationalistic planning procedure. The name of one of the leading concepts of the 1960s, Planning, Programming and Budget Systems, gives an indication of this view. Another feature uniting these first wave countries was a large public sector and, as a consequence of this, lots of programs to evaluate. A further explanation is the entry of academics with a social science background and with more training in evaluation, in contrast to evaluators who mainly had a legal background.

If the need for information affected evaluation activities in the 1960s, the perspective was different in the 1970s and the 1980s. Evaluation was seen as a means to help governments cut expenditure in the public sector. Still, evaluation was regarded as a rationalistic tool. Governments believed empirical evidence could provide them with answers to the decisions [Page 173]they should make. In the wake of financial crisis, ministries of finance emerged as leading players in the field of evaluation. Concepts or expressions such as management by results, value for money, and “new public management” became commonplace. In this development, a mishmash of terms, such as monitoring, follow-up, quality assurance, audits, performance indicators, service standards, and other jargon emerged, all under the umbrella of evaluation. The term evaluation became a semantic magnet. This is also the time when the second wave countries, for example, Australia, The Netherlands, and Norway, appeared on the evaluation map.

...