The use of policy evaluation plays an important role as a feedback loop in the policy cycle, both ex ante to gauge the impact of future initiatives, and ex post to assess the results and outcomes of policy implementation. It helps to assess policy outcomes, impacts, and to connect them with the decisions of policy makers, facilitating mutual learning with a strong focus on accountability. Policy evaluations are demanding in terms of time, human and financial resources. Governments, therefore, face the task of ensuring that the invested resources generate public value by promoting the use of findings in decision-making.
The majority of OECD countries have developed mechanisms to promote the use of policy evaluation findings (e.g. incorporation of findings in the budget cycle, discussion at the Council of Ministers), except Belgium, the Czech Republic, Iceland, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey. Japan and Mexico have currently five different mechanisms in place to promote the use of policy findings, and Latvia has four. Eight OECD countries have two mechanisms in place and eight have three. Nine countries have one single mechanism in place.
Twenty-one countries explicitly incorporate evaluation findings into the budget cycle. This is the sole mechanism for promoting their use in France, Israel, Sweden and the United Kingdom. In Canada, findings are required to inform the Treasury Board decisions on expenditure and allocation as they are part of the management accountability framework.
The results are brought for consideration at the highest political level in 11 countries, and this is the only mechanism to promote their use in Hungary and Lithuania. In Korea, for instance, line ministries inform the Council of Ministers on the implementation of specific items requiring improvement according to the annual evaluation results. The United States has created an Interagency Council on Evaluation Policy, co-chaired by the Office on Management and Budget (OMB and the Department of Labour, composed of about ten high-capacity officers from government agencies, who every month to discuss evaluation results.
A management response mechanism exists in ten countries in order to promote the use of policy findings, and it is the only way of doing so in New Zealand. Eleven OECD countries (Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States) use co-ordination platforms across government for such purpose. Norway has chosen it to be the only way to promote the use of findings.
In eight of those countries, online platforms share evaluation findings with practitioners and local governments. In Norway, for instance, the creation of the web service that gathers the findings of evaluations carried out by the central government in one place aims to increase the use of evidence in all state policy areas and future evaluations. The platforms aim to ensure that evidence is directed to inform policy design in seven countries. Other mechanisms, such as the mapping of the evidence brokerage function are less used, although Estonia and the United States stand out in this area. In Germany and Mexico, the co-ordination platforms serve four different functions. In Poland and Japan, they serve none of the aforementioned functions.
