Changing Bureaucracies: Adapting to Uncertainty, and How Evaluation Can Help by Burt Perrin & Tony Tyrrell

Author:Burt Perrin & Tony Tyrrell [Perrin, Burt & Tyrrell, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, General, Reference
ISBN: 9781000260144
Google: QkYHEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57064289
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-29T07:00:15+00:00

What the Literature Says About Evaluation Use

Understanding how and why evaluations are used and have an impact is a longstanding topic of interest to the evaluation community, going back some 40 years to when research on utilization-focused evaluation started to be conducted. This interest arose from the frustration of evaluators, primarily in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, at seeing evaluations going unused or having little influence, and the consequent threat to the profession from the decline in support for evaluation over the next two decades.

It is against this backdrop that, as of the 1980s, evaluators identified a number of forms of evaluation use, ranging from the direct and readily observable to the more subtle and difficult to discern.

The most direct and visible form of evaluation use is instrumental, which ‘occurs when a decision or action follows, at least in part from the evaluation’ (Patton, 1997, p. 70). Instrumental use generally manifests itself through the take up of evaluation recommendations and/or through follow-up actions stemming directly from ‘lessons learnt’ highlighted by an evaluation. A similarly direct and visible form of evaluation use is one that supports ‘innovation development to guide adaptation to emergent and dynamic realities in complex environments’. The learning, evolution, and development that occur in this context are referred to as developmental use (Patton, 2011, p. 1).

Evaluation use can also occur through the generation and accumulation of knowledge over time, contributing to rather than resulting in change. This is a less direct and less visible form of evaluation use and is captured by the concept of enlightenment use or an enlightenment view of evaluation (Weiss, 1999) and by the notion of conceptual use where evaluations ‘influence thinking about issues in a general way’ (Rossi et al., 2004, p. 411). In a similar vein, evaluation results can also be used to enhance the quality of the policy debate by supporting more informed argumentation or dialogue (van der Knaap, 1995). Evaluations may also feed into other structured processes in what has been referred to as reflective use (Jacobson et al., 2011). These forms of evaluation use explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that evaluations are but one input among others into policy-making processes and are less influential than the political and administrative context in which an intervention is implemented and its evaluation takes place.

Another less visible way in which evaluation use can take place is through the participation of stakeholders in the evaluation process itself. In this case, changes ‘occur among those involved in evaluation as a result of learning that occurs during the evaluation process’ (Patton, 1997, p. 90).

While the forms of evaluation use summarized above are clearly presented as being beneficial, some reflections in this area have highlighted other forms that are more ambiguous, i.e., the symbolic use of evaluations, which equates with ‘token or rhetorical support for an evaluation process or findings but with no real intent to take either the process or findings seriously’ (Patton, 2008, p. 104) and persuasive use aimed at mobilizing evaluation results to support or criticize a political position (Rossi et al.

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