Institutional determinants and mechanisms of evaluation use in public sector organizations

This project deals with the problem of insufficient use of the findings from evaluation in the process of formulating and implementing public interventions (policies, programs, regulations). Years-long observations prove that all too often public sector organizations use evaluation only symbolically (i.e. they conduct studies not to actually use findings, but only to demonstrate that their decision making process is rational and based on evidence). Explaining and finding a solution to this phenomenon is of great practical importance, because the quality of policies and thus indirectly economic development or quality of life depends on the actual use of evaluation.

Previous studies focusing usualy on the perspective of a single evaluation study have not yielded conclusive findings. For several years, a new promising approach has been developed focusing on the overall perspective of the evaluation system, i.e. an organization that conduct a stream of studies and should use it, and the environment in which it functions.

The aim of this project is to verify how the public sector organization uses evaluation, including:

• external pressure from the environment in which the organization operates (e.g. pressure from funders, or general uncertainty about the future),
• internal propensity to evaluate related to the type of business / activity.

The main element of the research design is the quantitative analysis of a large sample of organizations conducting evaluation in public and non-government sectors, from five countries with different evaluation cultures: Austria, Danmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Poland. The use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) will hopefully lead to the identification of necessary and sufficient conditions for each of the possible types of evaluation use and non-use. 

The main outcome of the study will be a theoretically grounded and empirically verified model explaining how the institutional context in which the organization operates and its internal characteristics affect the way of using evaluation at various stages of the development of its evaluation system. These results will contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of using knowledge in the activities of public organizations, contributing to the development of public policy and public management disciplines.