About participation requests and their role in community empowerment and making improvements to public services.

This policy briefing focuses on evaluability assessment, a systematic and collaborative approach to deciding whether and how an evaluation should be done. EA involves stakeholders working together to reach a consensus view of what the policy or service change is expected to achieve, what data sources are available to measure change processes and outcomes, and what is the best approach to evaluation.

Case study report that highlights the complex and diverse ways in which public services use evidence in decision-making processes using information gathered from a Scottish community planning partnership.

Claudia Chwalisz, senior policy researcher, discusses political participation for citizens. The blog, from August 2015, explores case studies where people have been given a genuine voice in decision making, following Claudia’s research for The Populist Signal.

Gary Smith, a member of the Fife welfare reform inquiry team reflects, in December 2017, on the experience and impact of the collaborative action research activities for What Works Scotland.

Annual evaluations of the police and fire reform, which aim to assess if the aims of the reform have been met, identify lessons for future public service reform and evaluate the wider impact of the reform. The evaluations are produced by What Works Scotland, the Scottish Institute for Policing Research and ScotCen for Scottish Government.

A documentary film exploring how community planning partners from two of What Works Scotland case sites learnt about implementing participatory budgeting on a study trip to Paris, European leader in mainstreaming PB.

Co-produced report that illustrates 10 key issues for the practice of collaborative and inquiring approaches to partnership working for health and social care integration. These are from the Beyond Action Learning project in Aberdeenshire which used an ‘action learning set’ approach.

This document, produced by the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, summarises the key policy development stages and timeline for the Scottish National Performance Framework and Outcomes Approach

Review of the academic literature on public service improvement to provide a working definition of the term and the main theoretical models of improvement. The paper also insludes a sample of the empirical evidence on ‘what works’ in improving public services