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12. ASSESSING PROGRESS THROUGH
EVALUATION
The goals we formulate in our political programs are often forgotten in everyday political
life. But goals and plans are the maps that provide direction for our work and must be
taken seriously.
To make goals meaningful we must systematically assess progress and evaluate
whether our decisions contribute to the development we want to see. We need to measure
the pace of development and to what degree we are fulfilling our goals. To enable us to
work like this we need to have goals that are formulated in a manner that can be measured
and assessed. Evaluations must always be an integral part of our planning processes.
In this chapter we will look at how we assess the fulfillment of our goals and our work, not
just in terms of the activities in our portfolio but also how successfully we as local
politicians plan and execute our work.
MEASUREABLE GOALS
Goals should be formulated so that they describe what we want to achieve, “a future state
we want”, “when we have done this, reality will look like this.” The goals must be clear
and realistic, aimed at activity, and limited in time. We must ensure that progress towards
achieving our goals can be measured or at least be evaluated. If this cannot be measured,
the goals will not function as steering instruments. We have to be able to determine
whether or not the goals are being achieved.
It is not easy to construct measures (also called indicators) that are reliable and relevant.
It is easy with financial measures such as incomes and spending, or other quantitative
measures such as number of worked hours, number of children in schools, etc. It is much
more difficult to construct qualitative measures. For example if we want to achieve a
healthier child population, we will have to find ways to measure whether we are making
progress. We could use a quantitative measure like child mortality and compare progress
every year. Clearly, we must know how we are going to evaluate the goals when we
formulate them.
EVALUATION OF BUDGETS AND FINANCES
The finances are central to all political activities and we are quite used to thinking in
economic terms in our evaluations. Material is found in financial reports and other