As one of its main working lines, EUROsociAL has established improvement of the quality of public spending through greater linkage between plans and budgets, and the integration of evaluation into the public policy cycle, with incorporation of the evaluation results in planning, budgeting and monitoring processes.

As a first step, in July 2014, an International Seminar on Evaluation was held in Montevideo (Uruguay) in which the participating countries exchanged experiences with the aim of together building a set of common basic guidelines for institutionalising public policy evaluation. As a deliverable of this seminar—which included the participation of representatives from Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay—the Handbook of Good Practices in Systematisation of Public Policy Evaluation. Experiences in Latin America was created.

To provide continuity to this process, in March 2015 a workshop was held in Lima, Peru, with the participation of key institutions involved in management of public policy evaluation in the five Latin American countries. There, the groundwork was laid for sharing roadmaps and creating a Working Group to enable the institutions to strengthen each other reciprocally, from specific spheres and, in general, comparable competences. At this workshop, the Comparative Study of Institutionalisation of Evaluation in Latin America was presented.

As a deliverable of the workshop in Lima, and based on the requests received from each of the countries, a specific roadmap was defined for supporting the institutionalisation of evaluation in the participating countries. In 2015, progress was made in implementing this roadmap bilaterally in each of the countries, and at the regional level with the definition and constitution of a Working Group on Public Policy Evaluation, which was formally constituted in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) through the signing of a Letter of Intent for the Constitution of a Community for Management Exchanges of evaluation knowledge and results.

The workshop was coordinated by FIIAPP's Evaluation Programme and included the participation of representatives of Peru's National Centre for Strategic Planning and Directorate-General of Public Budgeting of the Ministry of Economy and Finance; Uruguay's Directorate of Management and Evaluation of the Office of Planning and Budget; the Directorate-General of Budgeting of Paraguay's Ministry of Finance; Ecuador's National Secretariat of Planning and Development; and Costa Rica's Ministry of National Planning and Economic Policy.

This activity is part of the Budget-Plan Link action of the EUROsociAL Programme, financed by the European Union and coordinated by FIIAPP, with Spain's Institute for Tax Studies acting as an operational partner.

You can view the reference documents by clicking the following links:

• Handbook of Good Practices in Systematisation of Public Policy Evaluation. Latin American experiences
• Comparative study on the institutionalisation of evaluation in Europe and Latin America

FIIAPP/IEF