Danielsson, Marianne & Nils Hertting, eds., 2024, Samtal om idéer, utvärdering och samhällsförändring: En vänbok till Evert Vedung [Dialogue on Ideas, Evaluation, and Social Change: Essays in Honor of Evert Vedung] (28 bidragsgivare / contributors). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, pp 312.
In addition to a Preface by the initiators Marianne Danielsson and Nils Hertting 28 of Evert’s friends and colleagues from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Brazil have commented on his research and teaching in evaluation, evaluation methods, policy instruments, implementation, ideational analysis, energy policy, state secessions, and on Evert as a person, colleague, and mentor.
Nicoletta Stame, for example, focuses on his approach to side-effects of public policies which culminates in figure 4.4. of his Public Policy and Program Evaluation (1997, p. 54) where Evert combines intended-unintended & anticipated-unanticipated with beneficial and detrimental main effects, null effects, perverse effects and side-effects.
Her conclusions: “This is an outstanding contribution, that has not received the attention it deserves” by a person who has been “the first to take unintended consequences seriously in evaluation”.
Morten Balle Hansen tells us about the so-called Theory-based Stakeholder Evaluation Model published in 2010 and created by EV and MBH himself. It is downloaded 2 482 times from the American Journal of Evaluation homepage. The chapter follows closely the TSE-model’s diffusion, and applications not only in Denmark and Sweden but also in other parts of the Atlantic world.
Professor Luiz Pedone of the Univ Federal Fluminense provides a summary of Vedung’s six teaching sojourns in Rio and Brasília with lists of students and courses from 2012 to 2017.
Per Øyvind Bastøe of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation highlights some fruitful distinctions for evaluation commissioners: 1) Evaluation of existing or finished interventions versus evaluation of contemplated and planned but not adopted interventions; 2) Six categories of evaluation use: instrumental, conceptual, legitimizing, ritual, tactical, and constitutive.
Joakim Tranquist oral history interview (2009) charts Evert’s evaluation journey from his early discovery of the theme over conferences and visiting professorships in the USA, Canada, Austria, Korea, Denmark, and Helsinki to the foundation of the Swedish Evaluation Society (the last also covered by Sanja Magdalenic’s chapter)
Other contributors: Peter Dahler-Larsen; Frans L Leeuw; Wolfgang Meyer; Reinhard Stockmann; Kim Forss; Jan-Eric Furubo; Verner Denvall; Olaf Rieper; Rolf Sandahl; Bo Bengtsson Li Bennich-Björkman, Sebastian Godenhjelm; Sverker Gustavsson; Leif Lewin; Mats Lindberg; Ylva Norén Bretzer; and Stefan Sjöblom.
Evert Vedung, phone 070 4401315, from abroad +46 70 4401315; Email: evert.vedung@ibf.uu.se