Skip to main content

Global Evaluation: Regional Work of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation (FES)

In 2014, the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute won a competitive tender and was commissioned to conduct a global evaluation of Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s (FES) regional programs. The task proved particularly fruitful, not least because the ABI team benefited from prior experiences – both academically (in the field of regionalization/regionalism) and professionally (due to prior engagements with FES).
Consistent with the task at hand, the evaluation attended to classical evaluation indicators (relevance, effectiveness, sustainability, etc.) and also assessed the interfaces and synergies between country- and regional-level programs. Salient aspects of the evaluation included steering, communication, and networking challenges. Methodically, the assessments drew on extensive desk reviews, a global online survey (with roughly 150 respondents) and 50 in-depth interviews with FES officials in Berlin and abroad.
Based on these mixed-methods analyses, the ABI team derived a number of conceptual and operational recommendations that focused on aspects of thematic rebalancing, organizational steering, and internal communication. Several of these findings have been incorporated in the ongoing FES planning and implementation process.
An abstract of the evaluatio is avalable on the website of the FES: http://www.fes.de/international/inhalt/Kurzfassung_Querschnittsevaluierung_Regionalisierung_FES_Homepage.pdf.

Duration of the project:
2014