Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This study examines how the evaluations carried out by the Catalan Institute for Public Policy Evaluation (Ivàlua) from 2009 and 2016 have been used by commissioning entities (mainly public administration bodies). We use a mixed-methods research design to assess the uses of 32 evaluations and to identify whether they have triggered changes in the design or implementation of evaluated policies and/or movements toward a culture of evidence-based decision-making in the organizations.

We find that 88% of evaluations have informed decision-making processes and 25% of them have led to concrete changes in the design or implementation of the policy. We also identify that, in several cases, the process of carrying out an evaluation itself has helped strengthen organizations’ information systems and improved practitioners and policy-makers’ knowledge and skills on how to deal with evaluations and evidence.

Our work has helped identify several conditions which should be ensured by both evaluators and policy-makers in order to produce useful and actionable evaluations and to promote the uptake of their results.