Introduction

New Deal for Communities (NDC) is the flagship urban regeneration initiative of the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (NRU), launched in 1999 and due to run until 2010. It is distinctive because of the espoused strong emphasis on ‘community involvement’ in the formulation and delivery of the initiative within the successfully bidding communities in combination with the current government's interests in evidence-based policy making. The initiative throws up the tension that has been ever present in urban policy through the 1990s of attempting to empower communities while getting those communities to demonstrate the value of what they plan to do within their neighbourhoods and communities through evaluation. Consequent to the complexity of the task and the multiplicity of government and governance levels implicated, the NDC initiative is subject to evaluation and monitoring activities at a number of institutionalised moments.

The question for us as evaluators and observers of evaluation in NDC is to make sense of this complexity and to ask the question of how do the different evaluation activities fit together. This chapter argues that the way evaluation activities have emerged has led to little evidence of learning in the early phases of these complex and fragile institutional structures. Our interest in how evaluation works within the NDC initiative needs to be located in the broader debate about understanding the utility of evaluation (or the apparent lack of it, see Patton, 1997). This work is our attempt to reflect upon our contribution to the National Evaluation of NDC and part of our ongoing commitment to work with partnerships to develop local evaluation frameworks.

Evaluation professionals have two potential and complementary strategies for developing the utility of evaluation practice. The first strategy prioritises epistemological enlightenment in order to better see the research subject (see, for example, Pawson and Tilley, 1997). The second research strategy stresses the better understanding of the socio-political context in which evaluation-based knowledge is constructed and employed. We place this chapter in this second storyline where evaluation is one process of knowledge generation that might inform policy development and implementation among others.

The chapter is divided into three sections.