Promoting Evidence-Informed Governance: Lessons from Evaluation

Abstract

The past half-century has witnessed increasingly sophisticated efforts in the enterprise to gather, interpret, and use information to improve the operations of the public sector. Performance measurement has been at the forefront of these efforts to generate evidence to inform policymakers, but the outcomes of adopting performance measurement systems have not always matched expectations. One challenge for performance measurement is that it can fulfill different roles that may be most effective in different situations. This article seeks to support performance measurement by describing parallel efforts in the field of program evaluation aimed at improving the fit between inquiry approaches and the information needs of specific contexts. The goal is to highlight the lessons learned in another evaluative approach to develop a more context-sensitive approach to using performance measurement in support of different purposes.

Keywords:

• context analysis
• evidence-informed governance