Table 3 Properties of good policy support. Here, ‘assessment’ can be viewed as a particular expert work producing a report about a specific question, or as a wider description of shared understanding about a whole policy process; assessment work is done before, during and after the actual decision
From: From insight network to open policy practice: practical experiences
Category | Description | Guiding questions | Related principles |
|---|---|---|---|
Quality of content | Specificity, exactness and correctness of information; correspondence between questions and answers | How exact and specific are the ideas in the assessment? How completely does the (expected) answer address the assessment question? Are all important aspects addressed? Is there something unnecessary? | Openness, causality, criticism |
Applicability | Relevance: Correspondence between output and its intended use | How well does the assessment address the intended needs of the users? Is the assessment question good in relation to the purpose of the assessment? | Collaboration, openness, criticism, intentionality |
Availability: Accessibility of the output to users in terms of, for example, time, location, extent of information, extent of users | Is the information provided by the assessment available when, where and to whom is needed? | Openness | |
Usability: Potential of the information in the output to generate understanding among its user(s) about the topic of assessment | Are the intended users able to understand what the assessment is about? Is the assessment useful for them? | Collaboration, openness, causality, intentionality | |
Acceptability: Potential of the output being accepted by its users; fundamentally a matter of its making and delivery, not its information content | Is the assessment (both its expected results and the way the assessment is planned to be made) acceptable to the intended users? | Collaboration, openness, criticism, intentionality | |
Efficiency | Resource expenditure of producing the assessment output either in one assessment or in a series of assessments | How much effort is needed for making the assessment? Is it worth spending the effort, considering the expected results and their applicability for the intended users? Are the assessment results useful for some other purpose? | Collaboration, openness |