4: Agency Capacity

Strengthen agency capacity to use evidence.

Other Information:

Strengthening agency capacity to use evidence: Proposals should strengthen agency capacity by promoting knowledge-sharing among government decision-makers and practitioners through clearinghouses that help translate strong research into practice; enhancing the skills of managers, program officers, and review panels to assess and use available evidence; and developing common evidence frameworks to better distinguish strong from weak evidence and measure cost effectiveness.

Stakeholder(s):

• Agencies


• Managers


• Program Officers


• Review Panels


• Decision Makers: Evaluation is useful only to the extent that it is being used for decision making. An evaluation plan that focuses evidence-building resources on the most relevant and actionable issues helps generate useful knowledge. Common evidence standards and What Works Clearinghouses, meanwhile, help make existing evidence more useful to decision makers.

Objective(s):

4.1: Agency-Wide Evaluation Plans

4.2: Evidence Guidelines

4.3: Learning Networks

4.4: What Works Clearinghouses

Content