By Saara Tamminen

The three day conference in Prague was witnessed by four Ecoryans representing different offices and departments, in addition to representatives from IDEA. In total, Ecorys gave three presentations (out of the total 140 sessions) in the conference. They concerned regional social IA methodologies, evaluation of URBAN II programme and SME policies evaluation. The overall theme of the conference was “Evaluation in the Public Interest: Participation, Politics and Policy”, which meant that a lot of very different types of presentations and sessions were held. They touched upon many of the Ecorys fields of interest: regional development, SME and industrial policy, education, gender and health policies, to mention a few. Given the average eight parallel sessions, we could not cover all the sessions, but we tried our best to join as many interesting sessions for Ecorys as possible. So, what did I learn during these three days?

First of all, I found that really proving that a policy has had an impact on the society is extremely difficult (no matter how big or small or effective the programme has been). The use of mixed methods for evaluations was discussed heavily in the conference and their use was generally recommended. Likewise, the use of comparison groups and propensity score matching was considered optimal for a lot of ex-post evaluation work (if it is possible at all). However, even these methods don’t always manage to prove any impact. For example, with respect to SME policies, all ex-post evaluations presented in the conference had failed to prove that these policies would have a real positive impact.

Secondly, especially on the field of qualitative methods for evaluations, a bunch of (new) methods/tricks has been collected. Ms. Kopp from Austria won the best paper of the conference award with her presentation on the use of Systems Constellations as a tool for understanding programme frameworks better. Related to it, Mr. R. Hummelbrunner was also promoting his upcoming book including large set of tools for Systems concepts analysis . It might be interesting additional training material Ecorys Academy as well. However, in general, some of my main findings included simply that based on the various presentations that I saw during this conference the Ecorys courses on presentation skills seem to be rather good. Similarly, if you would be interested on practicing you networking skills in practice, join the next ESS conference.

Saara Tamminen is consultant at the division of Macro & Sector Policies at Ecorys in Rotterdam.