The implementation of the eight Swedish ERDF programmes involves
a large number of projects in which innovative and entrepreneurial
environments are developed and regional attractiveness is enhanced.
Many projects show good results in terms of new initiatives, new
methods and new forms of collaboration between academia, business
and public agencies, but also in terms of new businesses and jobs created.
The projects, and the regional ERDF programmes funding the
projects, are expected to be in line with the revised Lisbon Strategy,
the Europe 2020 Strategy and the Swedish national strategy for
regional competitiveness, entrepreneurship and employment 2007–
2013. It is therefore important to describe and analyze the projects in
the Swedish ERDF programmes as little pieces of a large puzzle
involving far-reaching ambitions, not least regarding prerequisites for
innovation and growth.
From this perspective, the impact of ongoing evaluation on strengthening
the project’s abilities and efforts to create sustainable change is
of great interest. The concept of ongoing evaluation was introduced
for the current programming period and around 120 major projects
in the Swedish ERDF programmes have made use of it. In the study
on which this report is based, we conducted a systematic review of
final evaluation reports from ongoing evaluations at project level in
Sweden. The empirical base of the study includes half of the existing
ongoing project evaluations. As a complement to the review of
reports, we also conducted seven case studies in order to obtain a
deeper understanding of the projects, their ability to achieve longterm
effects and the role of the ongoing evaluations. The analysis was
carried out by using three mechanisms for sustainable change,
namely, active ownership, collaboration and developmental learning.
The study has shown that ongoing evaluation is still an immature
’profession’ and the reports reveal varying degrees of quality in the
performance of the evaluations. In some cases the efforts of the evaluators
have contributed to important improvements in the projects,
while in other cases the evaluator’s efforts can be seen as a traditional
monitoring of objectives and short-term results. A learning – interactive
and supportive – evaluation is important, because many projects
struggle with significant problems concerning, e.g. organization,
steering and efforts in relation to overall objectives. But the study has
also demonstrated that many successful projects do not only exhibit
expected quantitative results, but also appear to create sustainable
change in line with regional, national and EU strategies. The seven
case studies presented in the report illustrate how ongoing evaluation
has helped to improve the projects and generate long-term effects.