ABSTRACT
Evaluation has attracted so much attention from European Union (EU) policy-makers, who call for methods and standards of evaluation across the whole policy cycle, from inception to implementation (European Commission, 2015a). Through conditionality, the EU has diffused evaluation systems across public managers in regions and local authorities (Hoerner and Stephenson, 2012). EU-related evaluation practice has spawned communities of professional evaluators and consultancy firms in Member States previously alien to the culture of evaluation. And yet, there is a dearth of systematic social-science research on the subject: ‘Policy evaluation in the EU has hardly been studied’ (Smismans, 2015: 6). ‘Evaluation in the EU is an under-researched topic’ (Hoerner and Stephenson, 2012: 699). The few studies available discuss the methods of evaluation. Much less is known about its usages, the link between ex ante (pre-project evaluations such as feasibility studies, impact assessments, forecasting, and policy analyses) and ex post (unlike summative program evaluations, ex post evaluations are conducted some time after project termination in order to evaluate the project’s long-term impact and sustainability), and finally, ‘who is getting what’ – or, bluntly, the politics of EU evaluation. Major textbooks on EU politics and policies do not even have a chapter on evaluation – for an exception: Versluis et al. (2011; chapter 9).
