Now more than ever, policy evaluation is an important component in addressing the world's economic crisis. Before it can do so, the discipline must adapt to changing economic and political environments. The contributors address a basic question: What impact do crises have on evaluation and how can evaluation contribute in times of turbulence? Examining the state of evaluation today, the volume's editors cover a broad range of topics, including post-hoc evaluation; shifting economic paradigms; the World Bank Group's response to the global economic crisis; challenges in evaluating financial literacy; evaluating counter-terrorism programs; evaluation in the context of humanitarian crises; and why civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa matter in evaluating poverty interventions. The contributors explore the role of evaluation in the search for solutions to global instability. They recognize, however, that in order to address unprecedented crises, evaluation itself needs to be evaluated and updated as part of the process of change and reform. This volume is the latest in Transaction's well-respected Comparative Policy Evaluation series.

The presence of turbulence in multiple areas of our society--food, fuel, and finances-being but three critical areas presently being impacted means that long-held assumptions are no longer true, that the past is not prologue, and that the future is not clear. And enter into this unstable present the discipline of evaluation-a discipline formed and shaped in the past fifty years of stability, little turbulence, and strong assumptions that everything will go according to plan. If things do not go well, it is because of either a poor theory of change on how to bring about positive outcomes, or weak efforts at implementation. It is not because of the stormy present upsetting our quiet past. As it is, conventional evaluation behavior and beliefs are ill suited for these times. The transformational nature of the 'Arab Spring' is just one arena in which it is clear that a business as usual approach to evaluation is entirely inappropriate. The papers in this volume are from the 2011 Global Assembly of the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS). Nearly 350 development evaluators from eighty-five countries came together in Amman, Jordan to discuss and analyze the consequences of turbulence on evaluation. The intent of these papers is to systematically assess what changes have come during this time of turbulence and how these changes are impacting the craft of development evaluation. To be clear: this book is not about how to assess the impacts of crises on development and on people's lives. It is about the meaning of a changed world and changed assumptions on the concepts and methods used in evaluation.

The recent economic, social, and political turbulence has adversely affected both developed and developing countries. Development Evaluation in Times of Turbulence: Dealing with Crises That Endanger Our Future uses these traumatic years as the backdrop to observe and reflect on the consequences for development in general and evaluation in particular. The presence of turbulence in multiple sectors-especially in food, fuel, and finance-indicates that conventional evaluation behavior and beliefs are ill-suited to these new times. New ways of conducting development evaluation are needed, including more integrated approaches, increased stakeholder participation, better capacity building, and more effective implementation of the emerging paradigm of national monitoring and evaluation systems. Nearly 350 development evaluators from 85 countries came together at the 2011 Global Assembly of the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS) in Amman, Jordan, to analyze the changes resulting from the turbulence and how these changes fundamentally affect development evaluation. The chapters in this volume have been developed from papers presented at the meeting. This book will be of interest to members of the evaluation community, evaluators in developing countries, scholars of the present economic and social turbulence, and faculty members and students of evaluation at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Today, evaluation is part of governing systems and is supported by powerful institutions. It is taken for granted that evaluation leads to betterment. However, evaluation itself is seldom analyzed from a critical perspective. In this book, Jan-Eric Furubo and Nicoletta Stame have assembled an international line-up of distinguished experts and emerging scholars to fill this void. Examining evaluation from a critical – or evaluative – perspective, each contribution in this book offers a systematic and critical insight into the broader relationship between evaluation and society. Divided into three parts, the various chapters ask questions such as: What are the consequences of the institutionalization of evaluation? Has the professionalization of evaluators favored their action in the public interest? Is the money spent on evaluation worth it? Is the market of evaluation allowing real competition for the best services? The answers to these questions demonstrate that the constitutive effects of the social practice of evaluation can also be the suppression of other forms of knowledge and the favoring of certain notions about societal development and political and administrative processes.

Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Turbulence is devoted to a method for obtaining analytical solutions to problems of electromagnetic wave propagation in turbulence. In a systematic way the monograph presents the Mellin transforms to evaluate analytically integrals that are not in integral tables. Ample examples of application are outlined and solutions for many problems in turbulence theory are given. The method itself relates to asymptotic results that are applicable to a broad class of problems for which many asymptotic methods had to be employed previously.