A multi-step in-depth process focused on producing useful and usable knowledge for public sector leaders.
Evaluating Public Services and Policies
Built on the GTF “Pathways of Progress” methodological concept, the Lab meeting explored the challenges of building evaluation frameworks that actually work — and that actually interest policymakers. The next stage is the publication of the GTF Governance Handbook.
Technology is the baseline; human-centricity is the differentiator — but it is structurally blocked in many legal systems.
Evaluation must be holistic: second and third-degree consequences across services are where most frameworks fail.
Without incentive structures, frameworks don’t stick. Deployment logic matters as much as the framework itself.
Innovation ≠ progress. Digitising a broken process produces a faster broken process.
Full sovereignty is a myth. Evaluation must account for infrastructure dependencies and geopolitical vulnerability.
Satisfaction metrics must isolate service quality from political context to be meaningful.
The most impactful shift: using technology to find people who deserve services, not to police those who claim them.
The best service is the one you don’t need but invisible services get no political credit, creating a structural barrier to good design.
Four levels of state function (sovereign, social, mixed, economic) require different evaluation criteria.
Metric fragmentation is universal: every stakeholder watches one number. Frameworks must force the holistic view.
Reform fails not for lack of ideas but because some states’ architecture was never built for service delivery. There, the hard structural work has not been done.
A five-point test (works? complicated? better? feedback? fallback?) is immediately usable across all contexts.
Non-Western and post-conflict perspectives are not edge cases, they may hold the most relevant lessons for evaluation.
