Chapter 13: Evaluation Inside the Political System

It is noteworthy that evaluative enquiry, when it is internalized into a government administration, is co-opted by the administrative and not the political system. It is the job of the politician to make evaluative judgments, not the administrator. Parliamentary and Congressional committees of enquiry, local scrutiny committees, and public enquiries are all ideal audiences for evaluation and are always in need of evaluative information. It speaks to the failure of our evaluation community that such bodies appear to have little awareness of the evaluation function as a resource for their political decision-making and so rarely come knocking at the evaluator’s door for information. In fact, the evaluation function is ever more closely tied in to bureaucracies, which are often ill-equipped to deal with the responsibility.