Problems, Solutions, Participants, and Choice Opportunities: Evaluation in a Garbage Can
Problems, Solutions, Participants, and Choice Opportunities: Evaluation in a Garbage Can Why evaluations in international organizations go unused — and what it would take to change that An Inconvenient Starting Point Evaluation in international organizations rests on a foundational assumption: that producing rigorous evidence about what works and what doesn't will inform and improve organizational decisions. It is a compelling premise. It is also, for the most part, wrong — not because the evidence is poor, but because the assumption about how decisions are actually made is flawed. Study after study confirms what most evaluation practitioners quietly know: evaluation findings are chronically underused. Reports are acknowledged, management responses are filed, recommendations are "accepted" — and organizational behaviour remains largely unchanged. The profession has spent decades trying to fix this by improving evaluation quality, strengthening follow-up mechan...