Evaluation of the European Union Structural Funds Support in Poland: Scope and Significance

Poland has made significant efforts in the development of the evaluation function as a tool for better decision-making and good governance. Starting from the pre-accession program PHARE as legal obligation, current evaluation is not only used as a tool for accountability and knowledge production but evaluation results are used in the national decision making on. Poland has also made significant attempts to implement a European Union Cohesion policy, the outcome of which should be to decentralize the evaluation function too. However, the system is not working properly yet, due to different obstacles such as lack of human resources, quality of evaluation studies and relevant monitoring data. Poland is moving to the most advanced stage in terms of evaluation content, quality between European Union member states and maybe good example for the present and future members how to make evaluation really work for decision making and absorption of structural funds.