Evaluation meets two requirements :

   ■a political requirement : for public authorities, evaluation is a means to account for their actions to citizens. It helps thus to strengthen good governance and democracy.

   ■a technical requirement : evaluation is a tool that makes it possible to improve the efficiency and performance of public action. It is therefore one of the tools of State modernization.

Evaluation requires an integrated approach and reflects above all a state of mind. Hence the need for rigor, but also imagination and innovation, and even a lot of daring, and especially intellectual humility. This is why evaluation, technical as it may seem, has always remained an inherently political exercise - in the broadest sense - simply because it deals with values, outlooks, options and choices.