Policy Analysis in the Highlands and Islands Development Board

Abstract

This paper discusses some of the general problems of policy evaluation in an autonomous public sector agency, the Highlands and Islands Development Board. Firstly, it sets out briefly the background to the problem of Highland development and the role of the Board in tackling it. There follows some background to the current process of Policy Review (P.R.) within the Board and discussion of the relationship between the P.R. and the rest of the Board's organisation, which is of relevance to policy analysts in other bodies. In the next section there are alternative versions of measuring the effectiveness of the Board and its functions as part of the evaluation framework. In face of the difficulties evidenced in the previous section, the final section suggests how potentially useful conclusions can be reached in an imperfect world. Goals of social policy are often stated in deliberately vague terms, and analytical techniques should be sufficiently robust to convince decision-makers.