LIST OF PANELS

Following the debate developed in Singapore 2017, the objective of the panel is to develop stronger relations between evaluation research and public policy analysis (Geva-May and Pal; Weiss; Vedung; Peters). The aim is to help evaluation researches in taking advantage from the studies of the policy process to improve their use by decision-makers.

In the last decades, evaluation scholars devoted strong emphasis and efforts in the debate about methodologies; the discussions concerning qualitative and quantitative approaches appear now passed, with efforts to deal with the complexity of policies using mixed methods.

In any case, the policy evaluation literature – both oriented to policy making and to knowledge development - seems to lack, often, systematic connections and exchanges with the researches of the different policy analysis fields; for example, the studies devoted to the analysis of policy learning, policy change, policy design and instruments, and policy implementation.

With the aim to develop a fruitful integration between these two sides, the panel wants to deeper themes that can be eventually discussed in different sessions. In particular, the objective is to analyze

a) the connection between evaluation researches and policy learning, analyzing the relation among experts and decision-makers;

b) the progress of the debate on evidence-based policy making;

c) the use of big data in evaluation researches.

The debate on ‘Evidence-based policy’ underline the issue concerning the role of social science in supporting the policy-making processes e the design of public programmes.

The reflection of many scholars is often translated in methodological terms, and the conclusion is oriented to the adoption of approaches that improve the reliability of the causal inferences that sustain the attribution of an outcome to a programme; and the preference of the RCT designs is quite often the result.  Indeed we need to sustain a wider pluralism and expansion in the use of social science techniques in evaluation. For example, it is important obviously to collect evidences on ‘what works’ about public programs, but at the same time policy makers and citizens are interested in the transferability issue, i.e. the effectiveness of a program if implemented in another site; in that case we need to add to the ‘what works?’ questions regarding ‘what works, for whom, in what context’, the mechanism at the base of the observed changes, the reasons for the success of the winners and the failure of the losers, the implementation gaps, etc.

The objective of the panel is to improve the impact of program evaluation on the decision makers, avoiding the risk of policy-based evidences, developing a better conceptualization of collective problems and the feasible paths of solution.

We invite paper-givers to propose both theoretical and empirical contributions regarding three themes:

- the integration between program evaluation and policy analysis studies, concerning in particular evaluation useful to improve the policy design and policy implementation phases;

- the use of methodologies to deal with both the causal and the transfer problems, and the capacity to improve the plurality of approaches and research techniques;

- the role of big data in evaluation research.