Abstract
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By using evaluations for the socio-economic and development programs, the European Union played a decisive role for the introduction of evaluation as a management tool in the Member States, including in Romania. The pre-accession and post-accession process of Romania to the EU had and still has an important influence on the on practice in which the evaluation of projects, programs and public policies is performed in Romania.
A proper management of the implementation of the EU programs has been a constant concern of the Romanian administration. Since its accession to the EU, in 1st of January 2007, Romania become responsible in administrating the evaluation of EU funded programs, under the Extended Decentralization Implementation System (EDIS). At the same time, the evaluation of public policies was formally introduced in Romania in 2005, when was issued the Governmental Decision (GD 775) on elaboration, implementation and evaluation of public policy at central level. Nevertheless, the public policy evaluation practice is still not much developed, despite the institutional and legislative framework created.
The paper is trying to examine how the experience gained throughout the independent evaluations of the pre-accession funds generated knowledge for learning, therefore contributing to more efficient evaluation of the Structural Instruments, and could further contribute to the development of the public policies evaluation practice in Romania. Currently, while the last Interim Evaluation of Phare and Transition is carried out, the first round of interim evaluations on Structural Instruments are unfolding. Also there is a positive attitude within Romanian administration towards extending the evaluation to the public policy.
The hypothesizes is that the experience generated by the independent evaluation use of the pre-accession EU funds is supporting the use of the larger evaluation exercise of the Structural Instruments, and will contribute to further expansion of the evaluation practice to the national public policies. A special consideration will be given to the usefulness of the recommendations issued in the evaluation exercises, and to the extent on which their implementation contributed to the improvement of the programs’ relevance, efficiency, efficiency, impact and sustainability.
The methodology employed in this research includes the examination of all relevant documents related to the both interim evaluations: Phare and Structural Instruments. This considers mainly the evaluation strategies, the evaluation guides, and the evaluation reports. The opinion of the key stakeholders on the evaluation practice will be considered, by applying a specific questionnaire regarding the evaluation use, combined with interviews of the key stakeholders (eg. the Head of Evaluation Central Unit, the members of Evaluation Units within Managing Authorities for Operational Programs and the members of the Public Policy Units within the Romanian Ministries).
Based on the experience build so far from independent evaluation of pre-accession and post-accession programs, there is expected further extension on the use of this type of evaluation, beyond EU funded Structural Instruments, to the national budget funded public policies. This is an important factor of Romanian governance, especially in the crisis context, from at least two perspectives: first, given the restricted resources, evaluation could contribute to a more efficient spending of the resources to programs and policies that have a wider impact and resolve problems that have greater desirability and urgency from the social perspective. Another benefit is the accountability of public institutions, creating a better communication between the political class, government and citizens regarding the public interventions, generating also the necessary constituency support.
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