Abstract
This article considers how evaluation practice can improve so that the support offered to decision makers is a better reflection of the reality being evaluated. The article examines a number of evaluations of the same intervention, Regional Selective Assistance administered by Scottish Enterprise, one of Scotland’s two public sector economic development agencies. The assumptions underpinning the evaluations have changed over time. The earlier ones assumed that it was possible to evaluate the intervention in isolation: ignoring the factors that Realistic Evaluation highlights as affecting impacts: Context, Mechanisms and the Outcome Configuration. Later evaluations implicitly acknowledged these factors. However, the evaluations produced different results so that, rather than triangulation resulting in a degree of consensus, policy makers were presented with different views as to the effectiveness of the same intervention. The conclusion is that both evaluators and policy makers need to explicitly accept the Realistic Evaluation agenda and realize that causality is far more complicated than is often assumed. This would be aided if there was more transparency in evaluation methodologies and the use of different approaches to evaluate the same intervention so that any findings were triangulated.
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