Abstract This article discusses the politics of policy evaluation and approaches this in two ways, each with its own shortcomings and crucial strengths. The first approach looks at the roles and functions of policy evaluation and puts them in the wider politics of public policy making. The second looks at how the key schools of policy analysis propose to deal with the contested and inherently political nature of evaluation. The article ends with an original view of how policy analysis may cope with the challenge of ex post evaluation.
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