1. How does the adopted approach to measuring human development differ from other approaches?
The key to define evidence-based policy is the concept of evidence or, put in other words, documented facts. It is a very wide category which includes both expert knowledge (especially that of think-tanks and international organisations), scientific publications, statistical reports, evaluation reports, social consultancy results, economic analyses, social experiments, modelling and econometric analyses. Knowledge contained in data is not made available by simple exploration based on reports, but demands a deepened analysis as in the case of the LHDI. It is often the case that data gathered even in advanced IT systems is used only superficially and decisions are made on the basis of experience and intuition rather than up-to-date information (Start & Hovland 2004). The LHDI may be helpful in formulating arguments based on objective information on social phenomena. Traditionally understood public policy is constituted by a sequence of interrelated elements: 1. Identifying the problem and evaluating the reasonability of public intervention to solve it. 2. Defining rules and goals of the designed public policy. 3. Pointing out the list of instruments and resources necessary to achieve the goals set and evaluating their reasonability. Additionally, the sequence must include a separate stage for public consultation of the designed public policy together with its main stakeholders. The purpose of these consultations is to empower civic society and to provide access to local, grass-root knowledge. The LHDI, as a measure of the public policies outcomes, may be helpful in all three presented stages. It may provide appropriate information which may also serve for policy evaluation. A lot of attention was already devoted to the role the evaluation of public bodies’ performance (Olejniczak et al. 2008; Olejniczak 2010). The popularity of this process seems to be inseparably bound with the expansion of the public sphere and the growing importance of administration responsible for completing particular tasks. What is more, this may be explained by the disillusionment by the low efficiency of the administration and by the quest for new organisational forms that would make public administration perform its tasks better and more efficiently (Zalewski 2009). The increased interest in evaluation research in Poland is strongly related to the Polish accession to the European Union. The reason for it is simple and relates to the obligatory requirement to evaluate public programmes financed by the EU and to the enforcement of evidence-based policy. Evaluating public policy is also important from the human development perspective as the LHDI may become an instrument for public policy, as discussed in this report. This approach is represented in the way the index is constructed and in the fact that, if necessary, it may be used as a tool for ex-post public policy analysis6 based on available data that exists already. Many sources of data are not available to the public and require processing before they can be used. The essence of strategic planning at the local and regional level is to formulate goals and layout paths to achieve them. The starting point in the process of constructing goals is to confront the facts and the most likely changes (coming from the diagnosis, projections and analyzes) with the aspirations of authorities and expectations of the community. The result of this confrontation is the vision of the desired state both for the people and for the politicians (Strahl 2006). The aim of this report is to investigate how the public policy investments relate to their results at the local level in Poland. By using indices for all of the LHDI dimensions, the investments (public 6 Ex-post evaluation is an evaluative research conducted after the end of a public intervention (programme, project etc.) (For more details see: European Commission 1999).
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