Lessons Learned about Evaluation in the United States and Some Possible Implications for Europe

This paper describes the main lessons learned about evaluation in the United States during the last 25 years and speculates about what some of their implications might be for the growing field of evaluation in Europe. We consider the organizational structure of the field, its political context, method preferences, |the use of multiple rather than single evaluative studies and ways to invigorate evaluation as a culture through avoiding certain kinds of method debates, through encouraging certain kinds of evaluation theory debates and through encouraging evaluators to think of themselves as substantive topic experts capable of generalizing from studies about what seems to work in a given substantive area