LIST OF PANELS

Evidence-based policy is becoming common practice in many areas of public policy. Evidence is generated through policy evaluations, the results of which must be relevant to the policy process. However, this requires the implementation of evaluation recommendations, which often occurs only partially or not at all. The aim of this panel is to better understand the barriers to implementation of evaluation findings and to identify potential for improvement. Our basic theoretical understanding is that the use of evaluation is a political process, driven by institutional frameworks as well as actor preferences and constellations. The regulatory, organisational and normative context of an evaluation system affects the use of evaluation results (Højlund, 2014), as does the political acceptance of evaluation results, issue polarization (Contandriopoulos & Brousselle, 2012), the nature of evaluative information (King & Alkin, 2019) or the prevailing view of what can be considered valid evaluation evidence. The panel's key questions are who commissions evaluations, who formulates evaluation questions and objectives, what form of empirical evidence is valued by actors, how evaluation results can be processed politically, what institutional structures are conducive to the use of evaluation results, what types of evaluation use are predominantly used in the policy process - instrumental, conceptual, symbolic, process use (Saunders, 2012)? Can we observe tactical, ritual, and constitutive product uses (Vedung 2021) and if so, what determines the type of use? How does evaluation use and product use contribution to organisational learning? The scientific contribution of the panel is thus to improve our understanding of a crucial step in the policy process, but also to explore evaluation use as a systematic component of evaluation designs. As a possible impact in research, we hope that the concept of evaluation use, which has so far been discussed primarily in evaluation research, will also be increasingly taken up in the debate on evidence-based policy by increasingly focusing on the institutional and political contextual conditions of evaluation use. Furthermore, we hope that research will increasingly focus on the institutional and political contextual conditions of evaluation use. It would be desirable if not only evaluation use, but also the 'usability' (Saunders, 2012) of evaluations in the policy process were studied more. On the practitioner side, a desirable impact would be to bring the emancipatory potential of evaluation use more to bear by involving stakeholder groups in evaluation use (Johnson et al., 2009).

The panel aims to facilitate an intensive exchange on these issues and to bring together experts from the fields of public policy and evaluation. Evaluation use is a complex phenomenon in technical, political and also systemic dimensions come together. The aim is to  together very different perspectives in a fruitful dialogue about this phenomenon. The panel therefore welcomes contributions dealing with theoretical perspectives on evaluation use, syntheses and meta-studies of existing evidence, but also concrete case studies of evaluation use in the policy process. Contributions from different social science research paradigms are welcome. Theoretical starting points can be the role of political polarization for the acceptance of evaluation results, the cost-benefit ratio for evaluation use, the importance of regulatory, organizational or normative contexts for the demand of evaluation use, the position of stakeholders in the evaluation process, the understanding of evidence. A wide range of questions is welcome in this panel. Among other things, it is of interest who commissions evaluations and for what purpose, which forms of empirical evidence are considered relevant for evaluation use and which are not, which actors and groups are recognized as central stakeholders of evaluations, who judges the political relevance of evaluations, at which point in the policy process is evaluation use admitted, or which types of evaluation use and product use are applied in the policy process - instrumental, conceptual, symbolic, tactical, ritual, and constitutive use? Another important area for research is the question of how evaluation use affects organizational and policy learning. The panel also welcomes contributions from different policy areas, as the policy arena, the demand for evaluation and the subsequent use of evaluation can vary greatly between different policy areas. Reflections on how the specific policy process of a policy area affects the use of evaluation can provide a more fine-grained understanding of evaluation use. In addition to causal studies, the panel is also open to descriptive and exploratory studies that raise new questions and theoretical assumptions and push the boundaries of evaluation use research.