“Evaluation of public policies makes it possible to observe their contributions to social change”

Intended to serve as a tool in the area of evaluation and monitoring of cooperation and public policy projects, the guide is aimed at experts in the sector, institutions, and members of the academic fields of development cooperation and public policy. Such as the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) and the Latin American Evaluation NETWORK, with which FIIAPP’s Evaluation Area habitually works.

Miguel Ángel Lombardo, Coordinator of the FIIAPP Evaluation Programme, states that “in this guide, institutions have access to a series of international standards for good practices in the design, management, and use of policy and programme evaluations. It compiles the most common definitions and introduces them didactically into evaluation practice”. Moreover, this guide can serve to develop or improve national evaluation agendas in individual countries.

The author of the guide is Carlos Asenjo Ruiz, a consultant specialised in monitoring and evaluation systems who habitually works with FIIAPP. In addition, Latin American planning and finance institutions participated in its creation, including SENPLADES in Ecuador, MIDEPLAN in Costa Rica, the Ministry of Finance of Paraguay, and the Office of Planning and Budget of Uruguay.

Miguel Ángel Lombardo, explains that publishing this guide “is important because it fills a gap in evaluation, which is the evaluation of public policies as opposed to the evaluation of projects and programmes. The evaluation of public policies makes it possible to observe their contributions to social change and in a more long-term manner than those defined in a programme or project.”

The guide includes a national evaluation plan, a prioritisation of evaluations to be undertaken, a series of key stakeholders to involve, and certain ideas that policy managers should use so that the evaluations are useful and attractive to ensure that their recommendations are taken into account.