UPDATE: Project details updated during the EPSA 2025-26 edition. Awarded Special Recognition for continuous improvement and long-term sustainability.
In 2016, the Public Policy Evaluation Area was created as part of the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration (Instituto Andaluz de Administración Pública – IAAP). The aim was to establish a public policy planning and evaluation system in Andalusia via means of research, training and promotion of actions in planning and evaluation of public policies.
With the creation of the Public Policy Evaluation Area, the IAAP aimed to improve the impact that public policies have on the lives of ordinary citizens. To implement this overall objective, three main priorities have been set:
- the promotion of a culture of evaluation in the organisation;
- the articulation of means to develop and put into practice the evaluation system;
- evaluation of public policies.
The Public Policy Evaluation Area influences all the work areas of the Andalusian Administration. It is an innovation project that wants to improve the policy planning and evaluation in all sectors, from education and employment to health, justice, finance and others. It relies mainly on three different structures, which give assistance in the achievement of its goals. They are the Oficina Técnica de Evaluación de políticas Públicas (OTEVAL), the Technical Evaluation Office, the promoters of the Junta de Andalucía, and the network of public policy evaluators. The latter is made up of a group of around 40 people belonging to different bodies of the Junta de Andalucía.
With a visionary and democratic leadership style, the Public Policy Evaluation Area leads the work of the promoters of planning and evaluation activities. One of the evaluators is tasked with networking, to organise the projects to be carried out each year and to be presented to the IAAP.
Furthermore, the employees are trained so they can participate in real projects depending on the subject, and promote the change process. They learn by doing and become experts in evaluation, which is the basis of the project’s success. Key to this is the training and participation of workers, so that ideas and start-up initiatives can be derived from them. This project not only promotes the improvement of the citizens’ living conditions, but also raises their awareness and active participation in the design and evaluation of the public policies that concern them.
Developments
Since 2021, the project has successfully transitioned from an emerging initiative into a deeply institutionalised service, backed by a formalised staff structure, standardised procedures, and cross-cutting digital tools. A major milestone in this structural transformation occurred with the formal creation of the Public Policy Evaluation Service (Evaluación de Políticas Públicas – EPP) in 2024, complete with a dedicated head and explicitly defined job positions. To support this institutional growth, the internal team expanded from six to eight members, combining the expertise of four civil servants specialising in pedagogy, economics, psychology, and ICT, with four external specialists in economics, sociology, and business management. Simultaneously, the Collaborative People Group (Grupo de Personas Colaboradoras en Evaluación de Políticas Públicas – GPE) consolidated its position as an innovative administrative model, growing to 37 active members by 2025. This group’s integration is further reinforced by a formalised membership process that officially recognises GPE experience as a professional merit for career advancement. Cultivating a robust regulatory framework, an April 2025 resolution officially mandated the use of the centralised SEPA digital platform for the registration, monitoring, and evaluation of all strategic plans and programmes across Andalusia.
This institutional foundation has driven a substantial expansion and consolidation of the service catalogue to meet rising internal demand. Methodological consulting services supported 28 plans between 2021 and 2025, while ex-ante evaluations experienced significant growth, rising from 13 total evaluations prior to 2020 up to 58 completed between 2021 and 2025. Pre-evaluability analyses similarly scaled up from 12 sessions in the 2016–2020 period to 44 sessions between 2021 and 2025, benefiting from the voluntary participation of 46 GPE members. Furthermore, midterm and final evaluations increased from just four prior to 2020 to ten from 2021 onwards. This operational scaling is heavily supported by continuous methodological development, including the publication of 14 comprehensive guides and manuals – eight of which were published from 2021 onwards – to standardise procedures and anchor evaluation practices within the Regional Government of Andalusia and the SEPA Functional Framework.
A cornerstone of this modernisation is the project’s digital transformation, marked by the creation of the Monitoring and Evaluation System for Plans and Programmes of Andalusia (SEPA). Funded through European resources and fully operational since August 2025, this unified digital platform streamlines the design, monitoring, and evaluation of public programmes. The architecture includes dedicated dashboard subsystems for planning, tracking, and evaluation metrics, utilises an automated technical support system, incorporates artificial intelligence capabilities, and allows for seamless data extraction. Demonstrating a strong commitment to open government, the entire SEPA platform was officially integrated into the regional Transparency Portal in January 2026.
Finally, the project has built an extensive ecosystem around advanced training, awareness, and national networking. The service consolidated its educational reach via massive open online courses (MOOCs), delivering nine editions focusing on evaluation, strategic planning, and advanced evaluation methodologies between 2021 and 2025, which maintained an average participant satisfaction rating of 8.5 out of 10. These training efforts are matched by highly structured mentoring programmes, open webinars featuring GPE speakers, and recurring milestone events such as the Evaluation Annual Conferences. Dissemination efforts are anchored by a dedicated news portal featuring more than 700 curated public policy publications, maintained entirely on a voluntary basis by GPE members, alongside active external outreach, including 14 distinct conference presentations in 2025 to showcase the Andalusian evaluation model. This regional success ultimately culminated in a major national milestone: the creation of the Spanish Network for Public Policy Evaluation (Red Española de Evaluación de Políticas Públicas – REDEVAL) in April 2025, an influential network established directly at the proposal and initiative of Andalusia to build cross-regional administrative capacity.
Long-term impact
In its initial impetus phase, the project focused on three main objectives:
- to promote an evaluation culture within the organisation,
- to develop the means to implement an evaluation system,
- to take the first steps in public policy evaluation.
These three objectives have been expanded and deepened. The evaluation culture has been strengthened thanks to the creation of an active professional community (the group of evaluators), the consolidation of a training network with MOOCs and technical workshops, and the participation of key stakeholders and citizens in public policy evaluation.
- The system has been formally institutionalised with the creation of the Public Policy Evaluation Service within the IAAP (Instituto Andaluz de Administración Pública – Andalusian Institute of Public Administration), the provision of specialised evaluation staff, the incorporation of the service into the strategic governance structure of the Regional Government of Andalusia, and the integration of SEPA into the planning, monitoring, and evaluation system through regulations.
- Now, stable services are offered, which are increasingly in demand by ministerial departments. The cumulative number of actions (more than 170 across different types of services since 2021) demonstrates the real and operational implementation of the system.
- The project has generated a significant long-term impact, the most evident being the spread of a culture of public policy evaluation in Andalusia: it has ceased to be an innovative experiment and has become a consolidated and structured service, with its own funding, staff, and recognised functions, becoming a recognised benchmark in planning and evaluation within the Andalusian Public Administration and at the national level.
Through the SEPA system, the various departments are required to use a common platform for the planning, monitoring, and evaluation of their actions, which ensures methodological consistency, traceability, and transparency.
Adjustment in the objectives
Since 2021, strategic adjustments have been made to institutionalise the system:
- First, the focus was broadened to a comprehensive, institutionalised planning and evaluation system. Evaluation is guaranteed through official requirements: prior evaluability, mandatory use of SEPA as the single digital platform, validated methodologies, a common language, and a professionalised structure. This has strengthened the system’s coherence, impacting regulations, strategic planning, transparency, and the use of data and indicators.
- Second, digital transformation and the incorporation of artificial intelligence were promoted, with a platform – SEPA – that standardises processes and automates indicators, improving the traceability of the public policy cycle.
- Third, evaluation competencies were integrated into the training catalogues that underpin the Board’s training plan.
Furthermore, with the structural creation of the Public Policy Evaluation Service within the IAAP, the strategic objectives of evaluation in the Andalusian Regional government evolved: from promoting an evaluation culture to increasing evaluation practices through standardised protocols; from providing resources to designing and managing technical, human, and digital resources (SEPA, methodologies). This generated a growing demand for advice and improved the quality of strategic plans. The professional community (GPE), standardised materials, and the mandatory use of SEPA ensure the evaluability of public policies.