What is it about?
Recognition of the importance of interactions between policies has fuelled demand for larger, longer-term, more holistic studies of their impacts and effectiveness. The broader perspective provided by evaluations of this kind appears to have been useful to policy makers, but their scale and complexity present practical and methodological challenges. Research funders need to commission and coordinate groups of studies rather than procuring research on an ad-hoc basis. Researchers need to be willing to share data and develop methods of collecting evidence relating to overarching themes as opposed to more narrowly defined programme and policy objectives.
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Why is it important?
This research summarises the lessons from one of the largest set of evaluations of public policy carried out on local government anywhere in the world. It demonstrated some of the strengths of system-wide changes to local government in the UK from 1997 to 2006 - and some of its limitations. The article makes suggestions for how such meta-evaluations should proceed in the future.
Perspectives
Meta-evaluation is still a relatively unusual approach to policy evaluation - but it offers the promise of triangulating results from many different perspectives and therefore of providing insights for policy which single evaluations of individual programmes or initiatives cannot identify. While expensive in resources, meta-evaluation is likely to be more common in the future, for those programmes and outcomes which are high priority in government.
Professor Tony Bovaird
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Learning from complex policy evaluations, Policy & Politics, October 2012, Policy Press,
DOI: 10.1332/030557312x645766.
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