The Politics of Evaluation

Abstract

The European Poverty Programme was conceived in the early 1970s, before the oil crisis and at a time when economic growth and the expansion of welfare provision were still taken for granted in the member states of the European Community. The Paris Summit of October 1972, which included not only the heads of government of the six existing members of the Community but also those of the four applicant countries, launched a Social Action Programme designed to demonstrate a flourish of social concern by putting a ‘human face’ on the Community. At the initiative of the Irish government, one element of this Social Action Programme was to be a programme of ‘Pilot Schemes and Studies to Combat Poverty’. By the time the programme got under way, in 1975, economic growth was grinding to a halt; by the time it ended, in 1980, the Community had been engulfed by the worst recession since the 1930s (Dennett et al., 1982, ch.1).