L’évaluation des politiques à l’épreuve des faits : Apports des débats autour des appproches evidence based policies [working paper]

The methods for the evaluation of public policies face two major limits. The first one happens when the schemes of causal relations involved in a given public policy are analysed only though the opinions and the knowledge of some stakeholders. When the description of these schemes is rather driven by some social sciences theories, a second limit may occur: the lack of confrontation with field observations. Both methods raise the question of their level of validity. In that respect, the EBP method proposes to ground the evaluation of public policies on scientific knowledge that rely on the best available empirical evidences. These methods are well spread in the cases of health or education policies evaluation in Anglo-Saxon countries. However, they are much less implemented in the two cases studied in this paper: agri-environement and agricultural extension.