'Doing evaluation': A consultant's perspective

Evaluation is important for regeneration and economic development, as it helps to demonstrate the impact that initiatives have on local people and places. This is important to ensure that one continues to learn lessons, to demonstrate accountability and to improve the effectiveness of future initiatives and policy. There are a variety of different approaches to tackling evaluation, including the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) evaluation framework, which sets out a generic four-step guide to developing and implementing the evaluation process. There have also been numerous publications on evaluation produced by other organisations, including the New Economics Foundation and Charities Evaluation Service. In CLES Consulting's experience, evaluation can bring with it a number of challenges and pitfalls, including the challenges of commissioning external evaluation, assessing the underlying rationale, performance measurement, attribution, additionality and value for money. This paper considers different approaches to evaluation and some of the main challenges that evaluation can pose to an evaluation team. This is based on CLES Consulting's own experience of developing and delivering evaluation across the UK and Ireland.