Evaluators as Information Brokers - Approach to enhance

M. Sounders, the President of European Evaluation Societyn (EES), said Petri Uusikylä's and Petri Virtanen's paper "Evaluators as Information Brokers - Approach to enhance social capital and policy coherence" was the best in Lissabon conferens.

You can the abstact here in this page, and The EES Newsletter April 2009 here (pdf).

Abstract

Modern societies live in the age of connectedness. Today, policies are more complex and interconnected. National governments have less abilities and policy instruments to steer societal development. Global issues (financial flows, environmental changes, ethnic and social conflicts and mass movements of population) have instant and direct impacts on European and national policymaking. Especially in the European Union multilevel governance system citizens are less and less informed who decides on what and what effects do these decisions have to their everyday life. All this sets enormous challenges also to expertknowledge and evaluation. Traditional programevaluation models and approaches are unable to provide this understanding to decisionmakers - not to mention average citizens of Europe.

In this paper, we propose that evaluators should take more active of a role as information brokers between governments and citizens. Evaluators should have an active role enhancing social and policy capital and

strengthening policy coherence. Basic idea is to combine bottomup information and weak signals (what citizens need to know, which are their interest, where are major gaps of ignorance) and topdown information (what is the state of the art expertknowledge on relevant issues, how this can be synthesized and what governments are deciding). New information technology and open architecture of knowledge provide great possibilities for experts such as evaluators to act as information brokers between citizens and government. New thinktanks need to be created as well as new discussion fora. Traditional evaluation reports are history. Experts need urgently new and agile channels to provide their information and knowledge and to hear what citizens want to know.

Keywords: social capital, democratic governance, evaluators role, policy coherence