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evaluation works best where the influence of other factors or variables can be eliminated. Thus, the method has some applications in situations where groups of people can, to some extent, be isolated. However, the heterogeneity of resources and their production base may present limited opportunity for experimentation of this kind. The monitoring of a policy retrospectively, even with the use of control groups, cannot be construed as evaluation using the experimental method, as this requires a program delivery focused entirely on evaluation considerations. However, well-designed programs of this nature using control groups (the quasi-experimental method) may offer some scope for evaluation.

Finally, the retrospective cost benefit analysis is an extension to the methods already outlined. The prospect of attributing a financial value to the cost and benefit associated with a particular policy signifies the success of this method. It does not, however, solve some of the conceptual or analytical problems of isolating costs and benefits, establishing causal relationships, and eliminating independent variables.

In practice, most formal policy evaluations could utilize a range of methods. However, much comment on the impact and achievement of policy by politicians, policy agents, and academics may not take care of these methods. Intuition, ideology, and received opinion, all figures largely in what may pass for policy evaluation. In the same way, implementation is as political a process as policy formulation, so retrospective evaluation is inevitably a part of a continuing policy process in which political imperatives and the focus of the policy figure highly. Thereby, identification of policy focus is important for retrospective evaluation of social dimension.

9.5 EVALUATION OF POLICY FOCUS

Retrospective policy evaluation engages the nature, causes and effects of governmental decisions or policies. The purpose of policy evaluation is largely to find out the appropriate relationship between the policy focus and the policy decisions. According to Nagel (1984) evaluation of policy focus may be done by concentrating on the following ways:

1.Taking policies as givens and attempting to determine what causes them.

2.Taking social forces as givens and attempting to determine what effects they have.

3.Taking policies as given and attempting to determine what effects they have.

4.Taking effects or goals as given and attempting to determine what policies will achieve to maximize those goals.

Among the propositions for evaluating policy focus stated above, the first two steps are mainly associated with political science or political perspectives. The third is usually an evaluation research, and the fourth one is for optimizing perspective of the policy research and mostly related to sustainable development. However, policy focus evaluation cannot be totally value free since sometimes achieving policy focus may be sacrificed for achieving or maximizing certain given social values. Thus, policy evaluation often takes extra precautions to keep social or personal values from interfering with their statement of focus. These precautions can include drawing upon multiple sources and individuals for crosschecking information, making available raw data sets for secondary analysis and making assumptions more explicit. In this regard, policy evaluation may have three perspectives:

1.deducing perspectives,

2.optimizing perspectives, and

3.political perspectives.

Deducing perspectives draws conclusions concerning the effects of alternative policies from premises that have been empirically validated or intuitively accepted. Optimizing perspectives deals with deducing the conclusions to ensure what policy will maximize benefit cost ratio taking into consideration that policies often have diminishing returns and must be analyzed in the light of economic, legal, and political constraints. The political perspective of the policy evaluation deals with the role of interest groups, government personnel, and government procedures in determining policy formation and impact. Each of the above perspectives of policy evaluation has its own merits and demerits as detailed in the following sections.

9.6 DEDUCTIVE POLICY EVALUATION

Deductive policy evaluation often refers to the more specific methods used in retrospective analysis of public policies. The main methods, however, are no different from those associated with social sciences and the scientific methods in general, except they are applied to

If the number of implementing agency varies, e.g., four to eight, there could be a difference in the achievement of the goals of a policy. Finding out such differences may be done by method 1. On the other hand, method 2 assumes that implementation of one decision may change the performance of other decision, and method 3 tries to illustrate the change in all other objectives due to a strict implementation of one objective of the policy. However, such a relationship is based on the assumption of a probabilistic approach that requires a large number of observations to fit in probabilistic distribution before drawing any inference. In the case of land use policies of the past, such a large number of observation is not possible; therefore, the implication of deductive modeling remains limited in this thesis.

9.9 OPTIMIZING PERSPECTIVES

The main scientific alternative to optimizing perspectives of public policies is to take policies as givens and then to determine their effects. This is often referred as impact analysis. An optimizing perspective on the other hand, takes goals as givens and attempts to determine what policies will maximize those goals. Generally, the best or optimum policies or set of policies are those which maximize the benefits minus costs subject to economic, legal, political, or other constraints. Models of optimizing alternative resource policies can be classified in terms of their involvement in the following findings:

1.An optimum policy level where doing too much or too little may be undesirable.

2.An optimum policy mix where scarce resources need to be allocated.

3.An optimum policy choice among discrete alternatives, especially under conditions of uncertainty.

In dealing with an optimum level problem 1, one needs to relate adoption costs and nonadoption cost at various policy levels. The optimum policy level is then the level of degree of adoption that maximizes the sum of the adoption costs and the nonadoption costs.

In the optimum mix problem 2, one needs to determine the relative slopes of marginal rates of return of each of the places or activities under consideration. If linear relations are present, the optimum mix is then the mix or allocation that gives the budget to the most productive places or