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"Inflation of Evaluation Methods as an Instrument of Governance in the EU - the Case of the Objective 3 of the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Evaluation of Finnish Products, 1994-1999"

Kankare, Ilkka (2000) "Inflation of Evaluation Methods as an Instrument of Governance in the EU - the Case of the Objective 3 of the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Evaluation of Finnish Products, 1994-1999". In: UNSPECIFIED, Corfu, Greece.

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    Abstract

    My current research examines the use of the ever more common evaluations as an instrument of governance in the European Union. In this paper I argue that the mere refining of evaluation methodology will never suffice to dispose of the fact that whenever large amounts of money are passed from one place to another, a great deal of politics is involved. Not even the best evaluation is a magic tool that automatically allows ignoring contradictory, conflicting interests, or economic, social and cultural factors, or solves the infinite diversity and unpredictability of social reality. Governance- based liturgy, however, maintains a different opinion, presumably with the well grounded justification that governance must be possible even in the midst of ambivalence and uncertainty. From this starting point it becomes, as I will demonstrate, inevitable that a lot of information will remain uncovered, and some of the discovered data will be false. In the scale of European Union, we are dealing with a significant problem. The main reason why the problem has been left without attention is probably that the magnitude of it hasn’t been understood. In this paper I will illustrate what these problems could be, what may result from them, and why they are worth a closer examination. My choice of case is the Objective 3 of European Social Fund (ESF), and particularly the Finnish projects and their evaluations of the period 1994-1999. I hope that after the discussions in the theme group I will have a better understanding and possibly some new ideas about how the problems may reflect to the European context.

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    Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
    Uncontrolled Keywords: European Social Fund.
    Subjects for non-EU documents: Countries > Finland
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > political affairs > governance: EU & national level
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > social policy > general
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Conference: European Political-economy Infrastructure Consortium (EPIC) > Ionian Conference 2000 - Challenges of the New Millenium, Corfu, 20-22 May, 2000 > Theme: Governance and citizenship in the European Union - the influence of culture
    Depositing User: Phil Wilkin
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 23 Jun 2003
    Page Range: p. 4
    Last Modified: 15 Feb 2011 17:16
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/645

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