Table of Contents

  • In a world marked by fragmentation, growing citizen demand and multiple tipping points, governments are confronted with increasingly complex, interrelated challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented such challenges on an unprecedented scale, obliging governments to quickly develop and roll out bold policy responses and extensive expenditure packages.

  • Policy evaluation is a critical element of good public governance. Policy evaluation can help ensure public sector effectiveness and improve the quality, responsiveness and efficiency of public services. Ex ante evaluation feeds into the policy-making process at the design and implementation phase, informing, for instance, the design of new rules or the allocation of resources. Evaluation is also essential ex post, to draw lessons and to provide an understanding of what works, why, for whom, and under what circumstances. Policy evaluation connects policies, policy makers and citizens, helping ensure that decisions are rooted in trustworthy evidence and deliver desired outcomes.

  • Policy evaluation contributes fundamentally to sound public governance. It can help governments improve the design and implementation of public policies that can, in turn, lead to prosperity for their country and well-being for its citizens. Policy evaluation contributes to promoting public accountability, learning and increased public sector effectiveness through improved decision-making.

  • Governments need to understand how and why a policy has the potential to succeed, and to ensure the efficient allocation of their financial resources. However, the understanding of the different practices used to assess whether government actions have met their expected goals and how they may complement each other, remains limited. This chapter provides an of policy evaluation across OECD countries and underlines the importance of developing a systemic approach in this area. The chapter discusses the relevance of policy evaluation and its distinctive role in the public sector and analyses countries’ definitions of policy evaluation. The chapter also introduces the three components of policy evaluation systems: institutionalisation, quality and use of evaluation.

  • Sound institutional set-ups can provide guidance and incentives to conduct evaluations across government in a systematic way. They can create conditions for transparency and accountability in the management of evaluations, and help promote the use of results in policy-making. This chapter presents the main aspects of the different institutional set-ups used by countries to promote evaluation as a practice within government. The chapter introduces countries’ legal and policy frameworks for evaluation and discusses the nature of policy evaluation guidelines. The chapter identifies the key institutional actors in charge of the management of evaluation within the executive, such as centres of government, ministries of finance and autonomous agencies, and underlines the role of supreme audit institutions beyond the executive. Finally, the chapter stresses the importance of co-ordination mechanisms to enable greater alignment and sharing of practices across institutions.

  • Quality and use of evaluations are essential to ensure relevance and impact on policy-making. They are key to promote learning, accountability and effective contribution of evaluation to decision-making tools such as regulation and budgeting. However, achieving both quality and use is widely recognised as the most important challenge faced by policy-makers and practitioners in this area. This is due to a mix of skills and institutional gaps, heterogeneous oversight of evaluation processes, and insufficient mechanisms for quality control and capacity for uptake of evidence. This chapter discusses the external and internal factors that affect the quality and use of policy evaluations, as well as their interlinkages. It examines the various mechanisms put forth by governments in order to promote the good quality and use of policy evaluations, and highlights relevant country practices in this regard.

  • This comparative analysis of policy evaluation builds on the data collected though the 018 OECD Survey on Policy Evaluation (hereafter, the “OECD Survey”). The OECD Survey is a direct response to the request to collect better data in the area of evidence informed policy making by the Public Governance Committee, in the context of the development of a Policy Framework on Sound Public Governance. (see https://www.oecd.org/governance/policy-framework-on-sound-public-governance). This Framework was derived from the aim to support policymakers by consolidating an integrated vision and coherent narrative of the main elements of sound public governance. The information on policy evaluation practices was gathered as part of the effort to inform the development of the Framework chapters on policy formulation, implementation and evaluation.