THE EVALUATION OF PUBLIC POLICY IN SPAIN: INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING AND PRACTICE

Public policy evaluation is a fundamental issue in any democratic country. Public authorities tried to give this range to evaluation both in the Spanish Constitution as well as in the General Budgetary Law. This acknowledgement should be the beginning of practice and transparency in using public funds. However, impact evaluation is far from getting its expectations. Ex-ante or ex-post auditing is a general and wide recognized practice but impact evaluation had not any effect in the past on the design or change of public policies. We aim in this paper for the necessary use of evaluation as a further step to legal or formal controls in a way such that it should be part of a natural activity in the future of our public sector. Since public policies are implemented according to pre-defined objectives, we should worry about their fulfillment. Spain has institutional design able to conduct impact evaluation so, these institutions need the support of politicians. The complete use of public policy evaluation constitutes a necessary condition for the transparency in the action of the public responsible to be true. Moreover, public policy evaluation could constitute an effective instrument in the decision making process. Another necessary condition is to put all the information available for citizens and analysts. We provide in this paper a descriptive study of the current situation of public policy evaluation in Spain as well as some possibilities at hand for giving a more important role to it in the future.