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The theme of the conference is “Evaluating the effects of public policies – principles, methods and practices”. Papers addressing the following questions were invited:
- Systemic issues of evaluation,
- Theory and practice of evaluation, including evaluation methodology,
- International activities of evaluation communities and
- Activities of the regional network.
CONFERENCE PROGRAM: https://www.sdeval.si/2023/06/02/preliminarni-program-5-regionalne-konference-evalvatorjev-zahodnega-balkana-wben5/
REGISTRATION (only 40 places left): https://www.sdeval.si/files/2023/02/Registration-form_Eng.docx
The Program committee accepted more than 25 proposals for the presentation from all countries of the region except Montengro, and from Poland, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the USA.
The accepted presentations can be divided into two groups: the majority of presentations relate to methodological issues, and a smaller part to European affairs. Among the latter will be presented the evaluation of the project establishing the Geological Survey for Europe, evaluation of the effects of drawing funds from the European Social Fund in Croatia and a gruop of presentations relating to a spatial development and territorial impact assessments.
Presentations dealing with methodological issues can also be divided into two groups. The first includes the presentation of two evaluation concepts (Outcome Harvesting, Key Horizontal Principles) and two proposals for planning and impact evaluation methodologies.
The second and largest group includes a presentation on the five methods of inclusive participatory evaluation. These presentations, each with their own logic, suggest different ways of synthesizing the opinions of many participants into summary evaluation findings. Two presentations advocate for the synthesis of cause-and-effect relationships, five presentations for synthesis with narrative approaches, one presentation through the transcriptional analysis of interviews with the help of Artificial Intelligence and one with the Most Significant Change (MSC) approach. Five tools for inclusive participatory impact evaluation will be presented: SenseMaker (Voices That Count, Belgium/Slovenia), StorySurvey and Causal Map (UK), Most significant change and AILYZE (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA).
The organizer is particularly pleased that the conference will emphasize various aspects of the synthesis of many diverse inputs into evaluation findings. First of all, because the Slovenian Evaluation Society has been developing a method for synthetic evaluation of the effects of public policies for 15 years alone, and nothing encourages us more than the observation that interest in synthesis in evaluation is gaining ground on such a wide spectrum of approaches. The Conference will compare different approaches about the similarities and differences between the approaches. By no means the conference will we be looking for the best approach to evaluation synthesis. It will be interested in how different aspects of participatory evaluation can learn from each other and how they complement each other.