Abstract:

There exists a considerable background information on the monitoring and evaluation (ME) of research projects and programmes (Horton et al. 1993; Fayl et al. 1998; Georghiou and Roessner 2000; van Raan 2000; Millstone, Van Zwanenberg and Marshall 2010; Link and Vonortas 2013). Other publications have analysed different practices related to the evaluation of research outputs, outcomes and impacts (Luukkonen 1998; Maredia, Byerlee and Anderson 2000; Furman et al. 2006; Grant et al. 2010; Bozeman and Sarewitz 2011; Czarnitzki and Lopes-Bento 2013; Guthrie et al. 2013; Morgan and Grant 2013; Bloch et al. 2014). Furthermore, in ME there is a lot of experience of research in the context of developmental aid, where there are many organizations funding research activities in developing countries, both as research projects and to build and strengthen research capacity (Guinea et al., 2015). ME is crucial for providing information about results and impacts in order to justify continued support and to inform management of the programme (Guinea et al., 2015). Complex projects, such as European Projects, need to devote resources to a permanent monitoring of the project quality components and the continuous evaluation of the identified critical factors, during all the phases. This is necessary in order to guarantee success and fulfilment of the commitments assumed. This task would be best done by neutral outside reviewers not directly related to any intellectual output of the project.

But if in an ideal scenario in which all the tasks are well defined during the early days of the project and developed as they were planned, would it be still necessary to have an outside reviewing team to monitor the project? The answer is yes. In nearly all sectors one proceeds in a continuously changing environment. New challenges come along during the course of the project, partners could be added or could leave the project, or, what is more important, the initial assumptions or estimates could not be realistic enough or be conditioned by unexpected circumstances. Another reason is the cost of failures. Nowadays, one cannot afford financial risks due to poor development or non-compliance with commitments specially if the project is financed with public funds.

An internal evaluation of a project aims to inform the manager of the project by assessing existing actions regularly and ensuring that relevant evidence is available to support the preparation of internal reports which assess the degree of fulfilment of the assumed commitments. So, every project should have an evaluation plan approved by all the partners and developed for an external group or a partner devoted exclusively to this matter.

For an Erasmus+ project it is crucial to have an evaluation team so as to design an appropriate evaluation plan, assist the project leader and focus on monitoring the degree of compliance with the commitments assumed for each intellectual output. The independence of the evaluators is essential and they should be invited at all the key project meetings and ensuring a continuous project supervision.

This paper examines the evaluation plan developed for the ELSE Erasmus+ project analysing the aforementioned aspects in order to contribute to the exiguous literature existing about this topic.

Keywords:

Evaluation plan, European Projects, ELSE.