Evaluating local partnership incentive policies : roadmap of a research project

To our knowledge, no frameworks currently exist to address the evaluation of public policies to incentivise the setting up of local government partnerships. This paper, the first in an ongoing research, aims to delineate an evaluation model based on the principles of the ‘realist approach’, which assigns a key analysis role to the context in which the mechanisms of a public programme work (or not). To illustrate the potential of this approach, a fragment of analysis related to the most distinctive phase of the realist evaluation (i.e., eliciting and formalising the policy theories to be tested) is presented and discussed