Evert Vedung Receives the School of Public Administration’s Award

Evert Vedung is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at IBF. He has had a long career devoted to evaluation — writing articles and books, giving lectures, studying interventions, reporting results, and in many other ways ensuring that research-based knowledge benefits society. For this, he is receiving the School of Public Administration’s Award for the Utilisation of Research in Public Administration.

“I feel very honoured. I have devoted much of my work to making research useful in practice, so I understand the motivation for the award,” says Evert Vedung.

Evert Vedung is one of Sweden’s most influential scholars in the fields of evaluation and implementation. He has identified six distinct waves of ideas in the history of evaluation, from the 1960s to the present day, each of which has left its mark on the public sector. The first scientific wave focused on experimental evaluation with control groups before a reform was rolled out on a larger scale.

“Both the experimental and control groups were to be measured in advance so that scientific conclusions could be drawn and then applied to the public sector. The idea was that decision-makers would simply adopt the results. But in the early 1970s, a reaction emerged, and the dialogical wave was embraced in Sweden.”

In this new approach, everyone affected by a policy — not just professors — was to take part in the evaluation process, which was to be carried out through dialogue. Since then, the field has oscillated between being strictly scientific and more democratic.

“And that is how it has continued. Today, there is much talk about evidence-based policy, but what I find most important now is what I call the collaboration wave, where the goal is to create new networks across sectoral, geographical and other boundaries,” he says.

As an example, he mentions the defence sector. In today’s uncertain global situation, Sweden needs to consider how to ensure that healthcare functions effectively in both war and peace, and how it can cooperate with the military. Such organisational questions are difficult to answer empirically.

“Or take youth crime — the fact that young people are shooting one another. No one really knows how to solve it. Should it be the responsibility of schools, the police, social services, or someone else? It must be addressed through collaboration. It is very cumbersome to work with experiments when dealing with such complex problems — clarity only emerges when everyone is involved,” says Evert Vedung.

Despite being 87 years old, Evert Vedung remains active and continues to attend conferences. One question for the future, he says, is what role artificial intelligence will play in evaluation.

“I shall probably continue with this — perhaps keeping an eye out for whether a new wave is coming, or how the collaboration wave develops. The major question now, I think, is how AI can be used in evaluation. There is no AI wave yet, but that is probably where the next major development will come.”