ten - Economy, equity or empowerment? New Labour, communities and urban policy evaluation

Summary

Introduction

You would be forgiven, reader, for approaching a chapter on policy evaluation with feelings of intense indifference. Policy evaluation may well suggest a purely bureaucratic or technical exercise, of interest only to those obsessed with the minutiae of policy design, research methodology and data collection. Such perceptions are undoubtedly underpinned by much of the literature on evaluation, which has tended to focus largely on technical issues such as measuring the net impact of policy intervention and of demonstrating causal links between policy change and policy outcomes. At the same time, however, a growing number of authors have emphasised the deeply political nature of policy evaluation and, in the specific context of urban policy, have shown how evaluators play a central role in what is invariably a highly contested policy context (Turok, 1991; Townley and Wilks-Heeg, 1999). Here, it has been argued that evaluation provides a focal point for competing visions of urban policy and that it is inextricably bound up with wider ideologies of urban policy intervention. Far from acting as detached and objective observers, evaluators may implicitly reinforce, subtly redefine, or, much more rarely, explicitly challenge the key ideological assumptions on which urban policy initiatives are founded.

Seen in this way, evaluation constitutes a critical issue in relation to the emerging discourses of community involvement in urban policy. The stress that New Labour has placed on the need for community leadership at all stages of the urban policy process has increasingly prompted observers to raise fundamental questions about the character and role of evaluation (see NCVO, 2000; Slowey et al, 2001; Sullivan and Potter, 2001). Do conventional evaluation approaches alienate local communities, rather than promote their involvement? If so, how can evaluation methodologies promote community involvement in line with wider policy objectives? Should community ownership of urban policy extend to evaluation? In other words, contemporary evaluation practice constitutes a key test of the extent to which governments are committed to community leadership in urban policy. It is with this issue of the relationship between the politics of policy evaluation and the role of local communities in urban policy that this chapter is concerned.