Made in Sweden: The translation of a European evaluation approach

Abstract

To understand how evaluation approaches change between contexts, they need to be studied in relation to their social, cultural, organizational and political contexts. The aim of the article is to describe and analyse how the European Union evaluation approach, ongoing evaluation, was translated in Swedish public administration. A case study shows how institutional entrepreneurs promote their evaluation norms of participatory evaluation and attach evaluation to a less dominant governance logic in the Swedish evaluation field. This raises questions about the role of the evaluator, evaluation terminology, and the unclear and weak borders of the evaluation field where evaluation approaches can be launched and translated with relative ease.