Chapter 6: A Strategy for Improving the Use of Evaluation Findings in Policy

Speaking to an international audience of evaluators in Vancouver some 15 years ago, Thomas Cook noted that the movement of findings from evaluation research into policy might not be such a simple matter after all. We evaluators had, as he put it, “naively anticipated that evaluation results would be routinely used as the central input into policy decisions,” whereas “experience has now taught us that decisions are not so easily made in the political world” (Cook, 1997, p. 40). But how then are they made? What are some of the factors that constrain the kind and amount of use we can expect for our findings?