6.10.2008
SC-Research the EES Biennial Conference 2008

European Evaluation Society’s (EES) Biennial Conference 2008 took place on 1-3 October 2008 in Lisbon, Portugal. The conference was entitled 'Building for the future: Evaluation in governance, development and progress'. Over 600 delegates attended the conference from all over the world and over 200 presentations were included into the conference.

The keynote speakers of the conference included Niels Dabelstein from Danish Institute for International Studies, who spoke about development evaluation. Professor Nicoletta Stame from University of Roma “La Sapienza”, for one, spoke about evaluation and policy implementation in multi-level governance. Dra Maria Moreira from European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction in Portugal addressed the issue of evaluating drug policies in the European Union; she described the current situation and future directions. Dr Vinod Thomas from Director-General Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank Group in USA made a speech about making evaluation more useful for determining development effectiveness.

The conference presentations were divided into seven different strands: (1) Methodological choices and approaches, (2) Ethical practice, evaluation standards and professional development, (3) Evaluation and its role in policy implementation and programme intervention, (4) Evaluation and building informal social capital, (5) International evaluation and evaluation in developing countries, (6) Evaluation and organisational development, and (7) Encouraging evaluation use. The presentation of Soile Kotala from SC-Research with a title ‘Evaluating the impacts of public R&D-project funding in Finland’ was assigned in the first strand.

The primary goal of the EES is to promote theory, practice and utilization of high quality evaluation especially, but not exclusively, within the European countries. This goal is obtained by bringing together academics and practitioners from all over Europe and from any professional sector, thus creating a forum where all participants can benefit from the co-operation and bridge building.