"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"

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