A few weeks ago I attended another public discussion on the (potential) role of evaluation in policy making. The brief conference - basically, a panel discussion followed by a question-and-answers session - was hosted in Berlin by the Hanns Seidel Stiftung and CEVAL, the Centre for Evaluation at Saar University. The panel was made up of German speaking evaluation specialists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
Policy uptake of evaluation findings has been a main topic of the International Year of Evaluation 2015– for instance at the Paris conference I wrote about in October. Evidence gathered in evaluations and research is supposed to support political decision making.