Organisational factors and evaluation use: results from a survey in five EU countries.

This study explores the organisational determinants of evaluation use. It proposes a framework distinguishing between the initial and advanced phases of evaluation practice and predicting what factors determine the type of evaluation use at each phase. Our framework was empirically tested using a survey of 1123 public and non-governmental organisations across five European Union (EU) countries: Czechia, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. Our findings suggest that the adoption mode of evaluation practice influences the dominant type of evaluation use, but this impact is limited to the first few years after the evaluation practice was introduced in an organisation. In the advanced phase, we identified significant relationships between dimensions of legitimacy and types of evaluation use. This suggests that organisational legitimacy remains a promising predictor of evaluation use; however, the specific dimensions and their relationships with different types of evaluation use require further investigation.