Improving decision making through policy evaluation in Belgium

Abstract

Box 2.1. Definition of policy evaluation Box 2.2. Understanding the Belgian public governance system and its impact on the evaluation institution framework Box 2.3. Spending reviews in Ireland Box 2.4. National definitions of policy evaluation Box 2.5. The Belgian Federal Planning Bureau Box 2.6. The Netherlands Strategic Evaluation Agenda Box 3.1. Skills for a high performing civil service Box 3.2. The Belgian Civil Service Skills Framework Box 3.3. Steunpunt Bestuurlijke Vernieuwing Box 3.4. Data sources for analysis and evaluation Box 3.5. The OECD OURData Index Box 3.6. Access to administrative data in Denmark Box 3.7. France Strategie's Evaluation guidelines Box 4.1. The OECD evaluation criteria Box 4.2. Skills for use of evidence Box 4.3. Centralised evaluations portal in Norway Box 5.1. Range of responsibilities of policy evaluation co-ordinating institutionsHowever, overall, the Belgian federal government still faces many challenges that hinder an evidenceinformed policy-making approach (Belgian Court of Audit, 2018[5]). In particular, there is little co-ordination of evaluations across the federal government, and, as a result, limited opportunity for actors to share good practices, to conduct cross-sectorial evaluations in order to better understand the linkages and trade-offs between policy areas, to increase the overall production of evidence, and to create a critical mass of evaluation skills in the administration. Evaluation demand, both at a political level and at the level of the senior civil service, is also structurally low, thus affecting the impact of evaluative evidence on decisionmaking. This low demand ultimately impedes the incorporation of evidence into decision and policymaking and decreases incentives to strengthen evaluation mechanisms more broadly.In this context, this paper provides an analysis of the Belgian federal government's evaluation system. It provides a gap analysis of its practices on the institutionalisation, quality and impact of policy evaluations by comparing them to OECD members' good practices in this regard. The paper thus takes a wholistic approach to policy evaluation, which not only looks at individual evaluative practices, but also at how those can come together so that evaluation becomes an integral part of the policy cycle. Based on this comparative analysis, the paper also proposes concrete policy recommendations for improving the Belgian federal government's evaluation system.