Outsource versus in-house. An identification of the organizational conditions influencing the choice for internal or external evaluators

Abstract

An evaluation can be conducted in-house or can be outsourced

to an external party. Yet organizations do not always have full

discretion to decide on the locus for evaluation implementation.

Certain attributes often push the organization in one direction or another. Via a systematic pairwise comparison of attributes of 18 organizations in the Flemish (Belgian) public sector, we were able to indicate the conditions that matter most in determining the locus of policy evaluation implementation. Our findings can thus enrich existing guidelines on the advantages and disadvantages of internal and external evaluations.