Introduction
Effective monitoring and evaluation of mission-oriented policy is essential to ensure the accountability of what are, by definition, ambitious and high-profile initiatives encompassing broad portfolios of activities and interventions. These processes are instrumental for steering and learning from missions, understanding what makes them succeed or fail, and identifying how they can be continuously improved upon, or even redirected. Such learning is fundamental to mission scale up and diffusion. Yet, on the other hand, it is also important not to overengineer and overburden evaluation requirements that might hinder constructive experimentation intended to direct policy interventions towards effectively tackling critical societal challenges.
Approaches
The Mission Action Lab works to develop and promote monitoring and evaluation practices calibrated to mission-oriented approaches. We therefore investigate questions such as:
- What do policymakers need to consider to plan effective mission monitoring and evaluation, from minimum viable requirements to more ambitious approaches?
- How does mission-oriented policy evaluation differ from traditional evaluation? What tools and methods are most suitable and valuable in this context, and what type of effects should they seek to capture?
- What role can mission evaluation play at different stages of the mission cycle?