The Changing Nature of US Urban Policy Evaluation: The Case of the Urban Development Action Grant

A good deal was written about the success of American urban economic initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s. Often, however, claims were made by a particular programme's proponents about that programme's benefits without those benefits being independently assessed. As a consequence, in the late 1970s and early 1980s urban policy evaluation grew significantly as a governmental activity. But by the late 1980s policy evaluation was in general retreat. This paper seeks to analyse why this occurred and concludes that the decline in support for evaluation happened for a variety of reasons, including, in particular, its perceived lack of utility for policy-makers and, relatedly, its lack of effectiveness in actually informing either policy or practice. To illustrate the kind of problems which beset policy evaluation, the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) was selected as a case-study, on the grounds that UDAG formed the centrepiece of urban economic development policy in America for almost a decade from 1979 to 1988. The paper goes on to suggest that the problems associated with assessing the UDAG programme were often more ideological rather than simply financial or technical. It is argued that as a consequence, formal, publicly available, urban policy evaluation has been steadily abandoned at both the federal and city levels in the US.