The Minister of Territorial Policy and Civil Service, Carolina Darias, opened the XI International Biennial Conference on Public Policy Evaluation on 24 September. This is a meeting organized by the Spanish Society of Evaluation, with international representatives and Spanish public administrations and experts in public policy evaluation, citizen participation and transparency.

In her speech, the Minister of Territorial Policy and Public Service highlighted as one of the great challenges to promote that evaluation be considered in decision-making and in public policy planning.

In addition, he expressed his conviction that evaluation is a “fundamental tool for accountability, for transparency, for improving public action, for reaching the most operational level of public management of an administration, an essential part of what has been called reflexive modernization.”

With thoughtful modernization, according to the Minister, a new reality is created, which is projected taking into account the demand for citizenship, with greater transparency in management, with a rational use of public resources and the need to guarantee rights.

The evaluation, according to the Minister, must be at the heart of the debate in order to achieve a public administration capable of responding to current and future needs, “that works in a more open, more inclusive, more transparent way and at the service of the citizens”.

In addition, the evaluation contributes to the improvement of public governance and that in a situation such as the current one, “the evaluation reinforces its sense when we value the success of the decisions taken”.

Advancing the specialization of public administration evaluation is the main objective of the Institute for Public Policy Evaluation, integrated in the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Civil Service, with four main lines of action:

1. To promote the practice of evaluation in the General Administration of the State and its public bodies.

2. Train public administration staff to enable them to participate in the evaluation processes.

3. To turn the evaluation of public policies into a benchmark and to be able to evaluate policies in all administrations and their agencies.

4. Create a regulatory framework that facilitates and promotes the evaluation of public policies, taking into account previous experiences, such as that provided by the former Agency for the Evaluation and Quality of Public Services.

It is necessary to create an adequate culture of evaluation and guarantee the quality of the evaluations, Darias continued, as well as the dissemination of methodologies and their tools: “In the near future we will present the methodological guides that will allow progress in the field of evaluation”.

“Let us make the most of this opportunity to reflect, participate and debate on the evaluation of public policies,” he insisted on placing the evaluation of public policies rather than public action, thus helping to improve their raison d’être, which is nothing but improving people’s lives.

Original source of the news here