Evaluating Public Policy Experiments

The increasing use by central government in the UK of pilot programmes as a means of modernizing key public services marks a new style of policy formulation and implementation which in turn calls for a different kind of evaluation support. The ‘rational-objective’, ex post analyses favoured by ministers and officials over the last decade are no longer sufficient. Instead evidence from one of the earliest and most important of the new government's pilot initiatives (the national Best Value pilot programme) suggests that it will increasingly look to evaluators to act as change agents who are able to combine summative analysis of outputs and impacts with more formative approaches focused on developing a detailed understanding of processes. This presents important new challenges for both policy makers and evaluators.