Evaluating Urban Regeneration Programmes in Britain

Since the mid-1980s, the British government has put more emphasis on monitoring and evaluation of existing and new policy initiatives. There is, however, little evidence to show that new regeneration initiatives have been formulated based on lessons learned from previous evaluation studies. The government's approach to evaluation of regeneration initiatives focuses on value for money and thus limits the scope and relevance of evaluation. I argue that there is a need to revisit the limitations of the current approach and to explore other approaches. This article aims to explore the potential of the realist approach in its application to the evaluation of regeneration programmes in Britain. A framework is proposed for constructing the Context-Mechanism-Outcome configuration put forward by Pawson and Tilley (1997). Several issues are raised for further debate. The purpose of the debate is to explore further refinements of the realist approach and to consider some of the possible problems in the research design.