The article explores the potential benefits to public policy of combining traditional evaluative inquiry with insights developed dynamically in policy labs. Twenty leading labs from five continents are critically analysed through a literature review as well as policy and programme evaluation
practices, assessing the extent to which the purpose, structures and processes used in policy labs address three challenges: (1) establishing the causality and value of public interventions, (2) explaining mechanisms of change, and (3) utilising research findings in public policy. The article
concludes that creating synergies between evaluation inquiry and policy labs can improve the design and implementation of public policy and programmes.
Evaluation units, located within public institutions, are important actors responsible for the production and dissemination of evaluative knowledge in complex programming and institutional settings. The current evaluation literature does not adequately explain their role in fostering better evaluation use. The article offers an empirically tested framework for the analysis of the role of evaluation units as knowledge brokers. It is based on a systematic, interdisciplinary literature review and empirical research on evaluation units in Poland within the context of the European Union Cohesion Policy, with complementary evidence from the US federal government and international organizations. In the proposed framework, evaluation units are to perform six types of brokering activities: identifying knowledge users' needs, acquiring credible knowledge, feeding it to users, building networks between producers and users, accumulating knowledge over time and promoting an evidence-based culture. This framework transforms evaluation units from mere buyers of expertise and producers of isolated reports into animators of reflexive social learning that steer streams of knowledge to decision makers.
The article provides a comparative framework for articulating assumptions made during the policy design process. That includes the framing of the policy issue in terms of the behavior of addressees, identifying problems that obstruct compliance, and choosing a tool with a distinctive change mechanism. Based on this discussion, a spectrum of six generic policy tools have been provided and illustrated with examples: (1) equipping policy subjects to perform behavior, (2) banning misbehavior, (3) dis/incentivizing addressees to behave in a certain way, (4) informing to raise the awareness about need for compliance, (5) boosting, and (6) nudging towards desired behavior.
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