Regional integration and public policy. Evaluation of the European experience and possible implications for Latin American integration

Includes bibliography

Applying a public policy evaluation methodology for local socio-economic impacts: an exploration in realistic modelling

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Public sector evaluation of festivals and special events

This research project set out to explore Unitary Authority (UA) involvement in festivals and special events across Wales. It considers the level and nature of UA involvement and investigates activity by event purpose; reasons for, and characteristics of, UA engagement; and, crucially, the extent and nature of event evaluation. The study’s aim was to begin the development of a baseline of information for further research into the growing use of festivals and special events as a strategy for local economic development in Wales. A quantitative survey approach facilitated a comprehensive snapshot of UA responses whilst also incorporating discursive elements. A telephone survey was designed and undertaken with representatives of all 22 UA departments responsible for festivals and events in Wales. The research reveals a significant level of festival and special event activity across Wales, supported primarily for its perceived socio-cultural value. However, evaluation would appear to be focused on improving processes and measuring economic outputs rather than assessing whether socio-cultural objectives are being achieved. Whilst overwhelmingly positive about efforts to improve approaches to evaluation, respondents held clear views about the complications most likely to hamper any such efforts. These responses focused upon the need for flexibility, cost effectiveness and comparability across festival and special event typologies.

Stakeholders and perspectivism in qualitative policy evaluation: A realist reflection

This paper examines the epistemological bases for the inclusion of stakeholders in policy research. While it concedes that the input of stakeholders provides essential expert and experiential knowledge for the understanding of complex policies and programmes, it contends that the approach which assumes that all interpretations of policy including those of stakeholders should be afforded equal validity, which we term relativist perspectivism, undermines the possibility of robust research by allowing power to replace methodological rigour as the primary research dynamic. It is noted that this problem tends to be more acute when the research is qualitative. A study into the gendered effects of Common Agricultural Policy reforms is used as an illustrative example of how research can be compromised by relativist perspectivism. It is argued that realist research methodologies uniquely provide the capacity to maintain epistemological robustness, while also being able to take due account of the perspectives of stakeholders.

Scaling up diabetes prevention in Victoria, Australia: policy development, implementation and evaluation

Objective
The Australian lifestyle intervention program Life! is only the second reported, large-scale diabetes prevention program. This paper describes the genesis and the successful establishment of Life! and its key outcomes for participants and implementation.

Research
Design and Methods Life!, a behavior change intervention, comprises six group sessions over eight months. The Victorian Department of Health funded Diabetes Australia-Victoria to implement the program. Experience of the Greater Green Triangle diabetes prevention implementation trial was used for intervention design, workforce development, training and infrastructure. Clinical and anthropometric data from participants, used for program evaluation, was recorded on a central database.

Results
Life! has a state-wide workforce of 302 trained facilitators within 137 organizations. 29,000 Victorians showed interest in Life! and 15,000 individuals have been referred to the program. In total, 8,412 participants commenced a Life! program between October 2007 and June 2011. 37% of the original participants completed the eight month program. Participants completing sessions one to five lost an average of 1·4 kg weight (p<0·001) and waist circumference of 2·5cm (p<0.001). Those completing six sessions lost an average of 2·4 kg weight (p<0·001) and waist circumference of 3·8 cm (p<0·001). The weight loss of 2.4 kg represents 2.7% of participants’ starting body weight.

Conclusion
The impact of Life! is attributable to applying available evidence for the systems design of the intervention, and collaboration between policy makers, implementers and evaluators using the principles of continuous quality improvement to support successful, large scale recruitment and implementation.

Essays in policy evaluation

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies that aim at providing new evidence in the field of public policy evaluation. In particular, the first two chapters focus on the effects of the European cohesion policy, while the third chapter assesses the effectiveness of Italian labour market incentives in reducing long-term unemployment. The first study analyses the effect of EU funds on life satisfaction across European regions , under the assumption that projects financed by structural funds in the fields of employment, education, health and environment may affect the overall quality of life in recipient regions. Using regional data from the European Social Survey in 2002-2006, it resorts to a regression discontinuity design, where the discontinuity is provided by the institutional framework of the policy. The second study aims at estimating the impact of large transfers from a centralized authority to a local administration on the incidence of white collar crimes. It merges a unique dataset on crimes committed in Italian municipalities between 2007 and 2011 with information on the disbursement of EU structural funds in 2007-2013 programming period, employing an instrumental variable estimation strategy that exploits the variation in the electoral cycle at local level. The third study analyses the impact of an Italian labour market policy that allowed firms to cut their labour costs on open-ended job contracts when hiring long-term unemployed workers. It takes advantage of a unique dataset that draws information from the unemployment lists in Veneto region and it resorts to a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of the policy on the job finding rate of long-term unemployed workers.

Policy evaluation with travel behavior models : methodological issues and case studies.

Mode of access: Internet.

An examination of attitude toward change as a predictor of policy/program implementation

Policy/program implementation, e.g., the process of fulfilling policy/program directives, is fundamentally tied to change. Implementation studies have examined the process, identifying many critical organizational variables although individuals perform the activities.^ Many of the studies are predicated on the rational, goal oriented model of organizations and examine implementation, presenting only the goal-oriented view. Organizational change and its resistance, however, are not fully explained by the rational model of organizations. There are other schools of thought providing different views of organizations from which explanation may emerge. Bolman and Deal (1984, 1991a, 1994) provide a different perspective for examining organizations Bolman and Deal argue organizations should be viewed through four different frames or lenses. Framing and reframing organizational action captures the complexity of action and provides better understanding of organizational processes. Understanding of implementation of policies/programs also will benefit from the use of the four-frame approach.^ The goal of this research is to provide a better understanding of the implementation process by examining individual attitudes toward change, the dependent variable of this research, and studying the relationship between the dependent variable and frame. The research was conducted in two phases. In Phase One, a survey was sent to 306 school administrators and teachers in magnet programs in Dade County, Florida. The survey instrument was composed of 55 questions including six from Bolman and Deal's Leadership Orientation Survey (1988) and 38 questions about organizational change. In Phase Two, more in-depth analysis of four school was conducted, to further explore the relationship between frame and attitude toward change.^ The results revealed that frame was a factor in explaining differences in personal Attitude Toward Change and Comfort Level with Change. Individuals using the symbolic frame had more positive attitudes toward change and were also more comfortable with change. The results of Phase Two of the research partially supported this finding in that the most fully implemented program was the product of an administrator who had chosen the symbolic frame. ^

Critical attributes of public-private partnerships : a case study in vocational education

The term ‘partnership’ is increasingly used by governments, industry, community organisations and schools in supporting their daily businesses. Similar to the terms ‘ICT’ and ‘learning’, ‘partnerships’ are now ubiquitous in policy discourse. Yet, the term remains ill-defined and ambiguous. This study reviews and reflects on a government led industry-school partnership initiative in the state of Queensland, Australia, to understand how the term is used in this initiative. Given the frequent use of Public Private Partnership (PPP) language, PPP was used as a framework to review this initiative. The methodology of this qualitative case study involved consultations with stakeholders and an analysis of Gateway schools documents, policy documents, and literature. The review suggests that despite the use of terminology akin to PPP projects in Gateway school and policy documents, the implicit suggestion that this initiative is a public-private partnership is untenable. The majority of principles shaping a PPP have not been considered to a significant extent in the Gateway project. Although the review recognises the legitimate and sincere purpose of the Gateway schools initiative, the adoption of a PPP framework during the design, monitoring, or evaluation stages could have strengthened the initiative in terms of outcomes, benefits, and sustainability.

Essays in partial identification and applications to treatment effects and policy evaluation.

Dans cette thèse, je me suis interessé à l’identification partielle des effets de traitements dans différents modèles de choix discrets avec traitements endogènes. Les modèles d’effets de traitement ont pour but de mesurer l’impact de certaines interventions sur certaines variables d’intérêt. Le type de traitement et la variable d’intérêt peuvent être défini de manière générale afin de pouvoir être appliqué à plusieurs différents contextes. Il y a plusieurs exemples de traitement en économie du travail, de la santé, de l’éducation, ou en organisation industrielle telle que les programmes de formation à l’emploi, les techniques médicales, l’investissement en recherche et développement, ou l’appartenance à un syndicat. La décision d’être traité ou pas n’est généralement pas aléatoire mais est basée sur des choix et des préférences individuelles. Dans un tel contexte, mesurer l’effet du traitement devient problématique car il faut tenir compte du biais de sélection. Plusieurs versions paramétriques de ces modèles ont été largement étudiées dans la littérature, cependant dans les modèles à variation discrète, la paramétrisation est une source importante d’identification. Dans un tel contexte, il est donc difficile de savoir si les résultats empiriques obtenus sont guidés par les données ou par la paramétrisation imposée au modèle. Etant donné, que les formes paramétriques proposées pour ces types de modèles n’ont généralement pas de fondement économique, je propose dans cette thèse de regarder la version nonparamétrique de ces modèles. Ceci permettra donc de proposer des politiques économiques plus robustes. La principale difficulté dans l’identification nonparamétrique de fonctions structurelles, est le fait que la structure suggérée ne permet pas d’identifier un unique processus générateur des données et ceci peut être du soit à la présence d’équilibres multiples ou soit à des contraintes sur les observables. Dans de telles situations, les méthodes d’identifications traditionnelles deviennent inapplicable d’où le récent développement de la littérature sur l’identification dans les modèles incomplets. Cette littérature porte une attention particuliere à l’identification de l’ensemble des fonctions structurelles d’intérêt qui sont compatibles avec la vraie distribution des données, cet ensemble est appelé : l’ensemble identifié. Par conséquent, dans le premier chapitre de la thèse, je caractérise l’ensemble identifié pour les effets de traitements dans le modèle triangulaire binaire. Dans le second chapitre, je considère le modèle de Roy discret. Je caractérise l’ensemble identifié pour les effets de traitements dans un modèle de choix de secteur lorsque la variable d’intérêt est discrète. Les hypothèses de sélection du secteur comprennent le choix de sélection simple, étendu et généralisé de Roy. Dans le dernier chapitre, je considère un modèle à variable dépendante binaire avec plusieurs dimensions d’hétérogéneité, tels que les jeux d’entrées ou de participation. je caractérise l’ensemble identifié pour les fonctions de profits des firmes dans un jeux avec deux firmes et à information complète. Dans tout les chapitres, l’ensemble identifié des fonctions d’intérêt sont écrites sous formes de bornes et assez simple pour être estimées à partir des méthodes d’inférence existantes.

A semiotic approach of multi-agent simulation for policy evaluation

Nowadays the changing environment becomes the main challenge for most of organizations, since they have to evaluate proper policies to adapt to the environment. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent simulation method to evaluate policies based on complex adaptive system theory. Furthermore, we propose a semiotic EDA (Epistemic, Deontic, Axiological) agent model to simulate agent's behavior in the system by incorporating the social norms reflecting the policy. A case study is also provided to validate our approach. Our research present better adaptability and validity than the qualitative analysis and experiment approach and the semiotic agent model provides high creditability to simulate agents' behavior.

Avaliação de implementação da Educação Superior a Distância: o caso da Secretaria de Educação a Distância da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte SEDIS/UFRN

The considerable expansion of Distance Education registered in recent years in Brazil raises the importance of debate about how the implementation of this policy has been happening so that formulators and implementers make better informed decisions, maximizing results, identifying successes and overcoming bottlenecks. This study aims to evaluate the implementation process of Distance Education policy by Secretary of Distance Education of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. For this, we sought to use an evaluation proposal consistent with this policy, and came to the one developed by Sonia Draibe (2001), which suggests an analysis called anatomy of evaluation general process. To achieve the objectives, we made a qualitative research, case study type, using documentary research and semi-structured interviews with three groups of subjects who belong to the policy: managers, technicians and beneficiaries. It was concluded that: the implementation process needs a open contact channel between the management and technicians and beneficiaries; the lack of clarity in the dissemination of information between technicians produces noises that affects the outcomes; the absence of dissemination of internal and external actions contributes to the perpetuation of prejudice in relation to Distance Education; using selection criteria based on competence and merit contributes to form a team of skilled technicians to perform their function within the policy; an institution that do not enable technicians generates gaps that possibly will turn into policy implementation failures; all subjects involved in politics need internal evaluations to contribute to improvements in the implementation process, however, a gap is opened between the subjects if there is no socialization of results; the existence of an internal structure that manipulates financial resources and balances the budget from different maintainer programs is essencial; the consortium between IES and municipalities in presential support poles are bottlenecks in the process, since beneficiaries are exposed to inconsistency and lack of commitment of these local municipalities