Science-Based Evaluation

Abstract

In the previous chapter it was explained that the role of evaluation in society is to a large extent politically ordained and the development of evaluation history policy-driven. Phases in which evaluation boomed and stagnated have, primarily, followed from courses already set in politics. Even the main topics with which evaluation concerns itself are set politically: in the 1960s and 1970s the main question in the wake of largescale reform programmes was whether the latter had ‘functioned’ and achieved their intended goals. In the economizing years, the 1980s, cost efficiency advanced to become the main topic. And the second boom of evaluation, since the late 1990s, has been attended by new control models and the increasing discussion of impacts. If the section which follows tends to emphasize the aspect of scientific integrity, sight must not be lost, on account of its paramount importance, of the complex web of relationships between politics and evaluation.