Level of Compliance of European Union Evaluations With United Nations Standards
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This thesis is a meta-evaluation which assesses the quality of evaluations of European Union (E.U.) financial assistance programs conducted just before and just after the announcement of a new E.U. evaluation policy known as “Better Regulation” in late 2015. In this study, evaluation standards set by the United Nations are used as the meta-evaluative criteria, while a set of recent UNICEF evaluations are used as a comparison group. Accordingly, this study uses eight evaluations from the E.U. and eight evaluations from UNICEF, with half conducted before Better Regulation and half after. To apply U.N. evaluation standards, the Global Evaluation Reports Oversight System (GEROS) of the UNICEF and its quality assessment matrix, which was designed in line with U.N. standards, is used. Results indicate that: 1) the average quality of the E.U. evaluations is much lower than that of the UNICEF evaluations and 2) the new “Better Regulation” policy framework of the E.U. has not improved the quality of E.U. evaluations so far. In the last chapter, this study proposes set of recommendations to help the E.U. improve the quality of future evaluations, and proposes a simple evaluation quality checklist with scoring reference for this purpose.