Evaluating Mission-Oriented Policies: New Approaches to Measuring Transform

Key information

• When: Wednesday 17th June at 16:30 - 18:00 BST.
• Where: Senate House, Beveridge Hall.

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Transformative mission-oriented policies, including innovation policies or green industrial ones, aim to reshape socio-technical systems, build dynamic public capabilities and foster long-term structural change. These policies direct public action towards societal missions and use those missions to coordinate portfolios of investments, institutions and actors across sectors.

Yet conventional evaluation frameworks, often centred on short-term outputs, narrowly attributable project-level impacts, struggle to capture these broader systemic objectives.

This panel delves into the challenges of conventional evaluation frameworks, asking a foundational question: which theoretical lenses determine what counts as success? The session explores new approaches to evaluation frameworks challenging the underlying assumptions about the purpose and meaning of evaluation practices. How can we assess mission-oriented policies with long-term transformative aims that require alignment across multiple stakeholders, private sector engagement in new types of activities, the development of new public, institutional, firm-level and workforce capabilities, and novel forms of coordination? And how might national and multilateral institutions adapt their evaluation practices to support, rather than constrain, transformative ambition?

By bridging evaluation theory and policy practice, this session explores how evaluation frameworks must be rethought to embed particularities of the Global South, and align with and support the transformative ambitions of mission-oriented policies. It will examine how evaluation frameworks can better reflect processes of vision-setting, demand creation, experimentation, collective learning and institutional transformation.

This panel is central to the Strategic Economics Alliance's mission of amplifying historically marginalised economic voices and translating new economic thinking, including alternative theoretical frameworks, into policy practice. The discussion, drawing on contemporary experience in Brazil, Mexico and Chile aims to recover and reactivate South-centred development theories - asking what they explain that Global North frameworks cannot, and how they might reshape both research agendas and policy practice across the Global South and beyond.

Speakers include:

• – Vice President, CORFO (Chile’s Economic Development Agency)
• – Professor at IBMEC and Visiting Professor at the Brazilian Center for Advanced Studies (CBAE), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
• – Director of the School of Economics, UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
• – Research Fellow leading the Business, Markets and the State cluster at IDS, Institute of Development Studies (IDS)

If you have any queries around access, please get in touch with a member of the team ([email protected]).

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Host or Publisher UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose