The Role of Evaluation in Building Evidence-Based Policy

Abstract

Growing recognition that many government programs may be ineffective, or at best of unproven effectiveness, has led to the evidence-based policy movement—an effort to ensure that proposed and existing public programs have been shown to achieve their objectives. Rigorous evaluation is central to this movement. In this article, I briefly review the history of evaluation of social programs and the barriers to the application of effective evaluation to public policy.