This book offers a persuasive acknowledgement of the relevance of adding a longer temporal dimension to the repertoire of evaluators. Taking the long view in evaluation puts old concerns about change and causality under a new light. It helps understanding program trajectories, their fate and their impact on society. Moreover, locating programs in the history of the places where they are implemented will help understanding the reasons for their achievements or backlash.
Nicoletta Stame, Sapienza University of Roma
As a former policymaker, in a Finance Ministry as well as a Central Bank, I have great respect for the need for fast and accurate information about the consequences of policies pursued. But this is not enough. There is also a need for deeper understanding of complex effects and their causes, as well as for following the effects in a longer perspective looking back and looking ahead. This information is also required when new policies are designed. Against this background I read Long-term Perspectives in Evaluation: Increasing Relevance and Utility with great interest.
Lars Heikensten, CEO of the Nobel Foundation and former Governor of the Swedish Central Bank
Long Term Perspectives in Evaluation
Long Term Perspectives in Evaluation is the first book to advocate the virtues of a long-term perspective for policy evaluation as well as to show how evaluations can take a longer time perspective than they usually do. To get there, it is necessary to understand the decision-making context of evaluations and study the obstacles and the resistance toward long-term perspectives as knowledge of that will lay the ground for more effective advocacy.
The book is divided into three parts: the first section examines different aspects of methodology and methods. In the next section, authors present case studies of long-term evaluations, examine their own experiences of such evaluations and discuss difficulties, challenges and lessons learned. Cases discussed include: education sector reforms in Sweden, local governance reforms in Denmark, policy interventions in Southern Italy and Brazil, and Paris Declaration Principles of aid effectiveness such as Swedish aid to Tanzania, Vietnam, Laos and Sri Lanka. Finally, the third section sees the authors turn to a set of contextual issues and concluding remarks.
Bringing together a rich collection of insights and a renowned group of experts, Long Term Perspectives in Evaluation: Increasing Relevance and Utility, constitutes a significant landmark in the field.
Kim Forss holds a PhD from the Stockholm School of Economics. His research has concerned comparative studies of evaluation, the design of inquiring systems and organizational learning, utilization of results, as well as process use of evaluation. He works as an independent researcher out of his firm Andante tools for thinking AB.
Ida Lindkvist is Senior Advisor at the Evaluation Department in the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Bergen and her research interest includes the political economy of evaluation and the practice of results-based management and results-based financing in aid.
Mark McGillivray is Research Professor of International Development at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Australia. His previous positions include Chief Economist of the Australian Agency for International Development and Deputy Director of the United Nations World Institute for Development Economics Research. Marks research interests include aid effectiveness and allocation and complex international development evaluations.
Comparative Policy Evaluation
Edited by Ray C. Rist
The Comparative Policy Evaluation series is an interdisciplinary and internationally focused set of books that embodies within it a strong emphasis on comparative analyses of governance issues drawing from all continents and many different nation states. The lens through which these policy initiatives are viewed and reviewed is that of evaluation. These evaluation assessments are done mainly from the perspectives of sociology, anthropology, economics, policy science, auditing, law, and human rights. The books also provide a strong longitudinal perspective on the evolution of the policy issues being analyzed.
Long Term Perspectives in Evaluation
Increasing Relevance and Utility
Edited by Kim Forss, Ida Lindkvist and Mark McGillivray
First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2021 selection and editorial matter, Kim Forss, Ida Lindkvist and Mark McGillivray; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Kim Forss, Ida Lindkvist and Mark McGillivray to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-52514-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05825-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents
Jens Andersson has a PhD in economic history from Lund University focused on African Economic History. He has worked as a consultant and evaluator for some 15 years within international development, with clients such as Sida, DFID, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the World Trade Organisation. He is currently responsible for monitoring, evaluation and learning at IKEA Social Entrepreneurship based in Delft, The Netherlands.
David Carpenter is an Australian evaluation practitioner who has over 15 years experience designing and evaluating aid interventions. He has worked for a wide range of donors conducting evaluations at the activity, sector and country program levels. He has a PhD in Human Ecology from the Australian National University. He draws on his understanding of interdisciplinary and systems-based approaches to design and conduct evaluations of complex, long-term aid interventions.
Charlotta Forss is a historian of early modern political and cultural history, and the history of science. Her doctoral dissertation from Stockholm University, Sweden, investigated the importance of the continents as conceptual categories in geography education and travel writing in seventeenth-century Sweden. She is currently researching the long-term history of health and morality through a study of the Swedish sauna culture, 16001800. This 3-year project is funded by the Swedish Research Council and is based at Stockholm University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and University of Turku. She has experience of historical debates from three continents through studies and research in Sweden, Turkey, the U.S. and Great Britain. She is particularly interested in questions relating to historical change and knowledge regimes.
