Abstract
With the shift towards new public governance, professionals' and citizens' experiences and knowledge are placed at the heart of public service design, implementation, and evaluation. There are thus beginning indications that the dominant evaluation and governance logic, including the notion that welfare services should be evidence-based and that the quality of public services is best secured using key performance indicators, are in the process of being challenged. Four waves of evaluation have diffused between 1965 and 2010, and a great deal suggests that new public governance, with co-production as the dominant organizational recipe, is carrying a new, fifth evaluation wave with it. The aim of this chapter is to provide a sober but tentative explanation of the content of this fifth evaluation wave. The description of the fifth wave evaluation is structured in respect to “informed evaluation,” which covers reflections on the evaluation domain, knowledge, values, and usage.
TopBackground
Before describing the four evaluation waves and identifying the collaborative and citizen-focused aspects, it may be expedient to look in more detail at the concept of evaluation. There is a requirement on documenting, justifying and legitimating interventions within all kinds of welfare spheres. The aim is either to check whether politicians, and ultimately, the taxpayers, are recieving the expected services, or to perform evaluations where organizations learn on an ongoing basis through the evaluation process itself. These two aims equate respectively to summative and formative evaluations (Bamberger et al., 2012). Evaluation is defined as “(…) retrospective assessment of public-sector interventions, their organization, content, implementation and outputs or outcomes, which is intended to play a role in future practical situations” (Vedung, 2010, p. 264).
As indicated by the definition, evaluation may focus on public interventions’ outcomes, performances or processes (Krogstrup, 2016). Outcome is defined as the change which occurs with the end-user as a consequence of the intervention, for example, the Corona patient gets well, the drug addict becomes substance free, 5th-grade students can spell. Performances are quantitative measurements of what employees or the organization achieve, for example, number admitted to hospital, number of children in the class, number of teaching hours at university. Performance measurements have been the dominant evaluation approach during the New Public Management era. Processes are management and decision content, and what happens during the implementation of the intervention, for example, whether an intervention is actually co-produced, whether the voluntary advice is of a kind that actually meets the victim’s needs. The above-mentioned evaluation approaches have diverse objects of evaluation, and views on what desirable knowledge is.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collaborative and Citizen-Focused Evaluation Wave: A potential fifth evaluation wave, that is logically expected to follow in the wake of the shift from New Public Management to New Public Governance.
New Public Governance: A governance logic that encompasses collaborative approaches to welfare design and production as an alternative to the top-down approach of New Public Management.
Informed Evaluation: A template for how to design a qualified evaluation, to ensure a coherent logic regarding the evaluand, the knowledge that is to be generated by the evaluation, the criteria of the evaluation, and considerations for how the evaluation will be used.
Evaluation: A retrospective assessment of public-sector interventions, their organization, content, implementation and outputs or outcomes, which is intended to play a role in future practical situations.
Co-Production: A process or an outcome of a process, wherein communities, individual citizens and/or service users participate in the planning, production, and/or evaluation of public services.