The readers of this GUIDE will come from many of the different communities active in the evaluation of socio-economic development programmes. These will include:
- Policy makers who have an interest in what evaluation can do for them including its strengths and limitations and the resources and capacities they will need,
- Public sector managers and civil servants who may commission evaluations and would like an overview of what is available including the choices of approach and methods that they should be drawing on,
- Programme managers who will wish to incorporate evaluation results into the way they manage and plan their programmes,
- Programme partners who are increasingly involved as stakeholders in evaluations, consulted about evaluation agendas and expected to use evaluation findings,
- Evaluators, many of whom will have detailed knowledge of specific areas of evaluation but will benefit from an overview of a wider range of methods and approaches to support collaborative work with other members of an evaluation team.
Although the GUIDE itself is intended for general users and readers, rather than specialists, we have also taken account of more specialist needs by preparing a number of sourcebooks to back up the content of the GUIDE.