Evaluation in the Australian Public Service: current state of play, some issues and future directions

This paper has been prepared as input to the work of the Panel undertaking the Independent Review of the Australian Public Service (APS). It is concerned with the conduct and use of evaluation in the APS. We find across the Australian and international literature, including a range of reviews of the activities of the APS from the 1970s on, and from our own discussions with senior public servants, a near universal endorsement of the need for evaluation, across all stages of the policy and program cycle. We find also, notwithstanding this, and the repeated calls from enquiries and reports for a need to improve the conduct and utilisation of evaluation, a general view that the state of evaluation within the APS is poor.