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First published in 1998, this volume examines how super-optimum decisions involve finding alternatives to controversies whereby Conservatives, Liberals, or other major groups can all come out ahead of their best initial expectations simultaneously. This book is organised in terms of concepts, methods, causes, process, substance, and the policy studies profession. Concepts clarify that policy evaluation traditionally involves: (1) Goals to be achieved; (2) Alternatives available for achieving them; (3) Relations between goals and alternatives; (4) Drawing a conclusion as to the best alternative in light of the goals, alternatives, and relations; and (5) Analysing how the conclusion would change if there were changes in the goals, alternatives, or relations. Super-optimizing also involves five related steps, but with the following improvements: (1) Goals are designed as conservative, liberal, or neutral; (2) Alternatives get the same designations; (3) Relations are simplified to indicate which alternatives are relatively high or low on each goal; (4) The conclusion involves arriving at an alternative that does better on Goal A than Alternative A, and simultaneously better on Goal B than Alternative B; and (5) The fifth step involves analysing the super-optimum or win-win alternative in terms of its feasibility as to the economic, technological, psychological, political, administrative, and legal matters.

This paper looks at some of the structural aspects of the making of evaluations of policies in order to help explain some common features of evaluative discussion of public policy. What from one standpoint may seem to be a lack of an evaluative stance, a non-evaluation, may from another appear to be the very model of an evaluation. The results of an evaluation carried out according to one method may conflict hopelessly with those carried out by another. The results of evaluations by two different methods may be the same and yet unrecognized as such by any of the parties concerned; and so on. The main source of illustrations we have chosen is (part of) the debate in the last decade on the evaluation at a general level of rural cooperative policies in developing countries. We are inclined to say that discussion and evaluation of rural service cooperatives has been particularly subject to failure even to hear, let alone to understand, by some of those making contributions from different perspectives and premises. Our treatment of this cooperatives literature cannot be exhaustive. In any event its major purpose is to help present and develop some ideas of general interest and application, which do not stand or fall only insofar as applicable to cooperative studies. Debates about other policies and institutions, isms other than cooperativism, where they have already attracted complex evaluative (and non-evaluative) exchanges, are similarly subject to rev~ew according to the procedures of this paper. This is illustrated in a later section (Section 7) by a brief notice and analysis of an important debate on capitalism and imperialism. The theoretical ideas in this paper are themselves far from being a survey of, or a programme for, evaluation theory, or even for the comparative analysis of evaluation arguments. But by looking at some ways in which the different parts within alternative or conflicting approaches may be related or contrasted, both within approaches and between them, our aim is to contribute to establishing a realm of discourse in which comparisons between rural (and other) organizations and policies can be made that do not, whether wittingly or otherwise, just talk past each other.

Policy evaluation is now recognised by many governments as fundamental to ensuring that policies are informed by quality evidence. Nevertheless, the practice of policy evaluation is still difficult to systematise inside governments. Building on more than 20 years of work on this topic, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Recommendation on Public Policy Evaluation, adopted in 2022, represents the first international legal guidance on the topic. It identifies three essential pillars to ensure the impact of policy evaluation: institutionalisation, quality and use. This article explains how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Recommendation was developed, what these three pillars cover, and reflect on how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development can further help countries developing a sound evaluation system.

International organizations (public and private) seek to find standard procedures to evaluate public policy or programs in order to have a common measure for public policy effectiveness and efficiency. The national governments, with the aid of the subordinated entities, are quite much interested in developing frames for the design of the evaluation of public policy in general and of public policy in specific fields, in particular. After having reviewed some models of evaluation, we will analyze the case of Romania and we will see that this country doesn't have a working conceptual frame for the evaluation of the public policy in the anti-drug area.

Spain's entry into the European Union (EU), in 1986, represented a great challenge in several areas, including the evaluation of public policy. In 1988 Structural Fund regulations were amended to include mandatory evaluation of European structural policies by both the Commission and the member states, and the 1999 reform strengthened evaluation requirements. This contribution discusses the major changes introduced in the Spanish evaluation landscape due to Spain's entry into the EU. It provides a description and analysis of a case that has elicited great interest among countries that have entered the EU in the 21st century and are trying to learn from the experience of Spain and other countries.