Compare methods
Review your selected methods side by side; rows that differ are highlighted.
| Fiscal Decentralization Analysis× | Realist Evaluation× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field≠ | Public Administration | Public Policy |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 1972 | 1997 |
| Originator≠ | Wallace E. Oates | Ray Pawson & Nick Tilley |
| Type≠ | Applied analytical framework for intergovernmental finance | Theory-driven, generative evaluation approach |
| Seminal source≠ | Oates, W. E. (1972). Fiscal Federalism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN: 9780155274525 | Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997). Realistic Evaluation. London: SAGE Publications. ISBN: 9780761950097 |
| Aliases | Fiscal Federalism Analysis, Intergovernmental Fiscal Analysis, Decentralization of Public Finance Analysis, Subnational Finance Analysis | Realistic Evaluation, Theory-Driven Realist Evaluation, CMO Configuration Analysis, Pawson-Tilley Evaluation |
| Related | 4 | 4 |
| Summary≠ | Fiscal decentralization analysis examines how taxing, spending and borrowing powers are divided among levels of government — central, regional and local — and what that division means for efficiency, equity and accountability. Its theoretical foundation is the fiscal federalism tradition pioneered by Wallace Oates, whose 1972 book Fiscal Federalism and 1999 essay set out when decentralized provision improves welfare and how intergovernmental transfers should be designed. The method maps the assignment of revenues and expenditures across tiers, measures the degree of decentralization and the gap between subnational spending and own revenue, and assesses how these arrangements affect service delivery, redistribution and the accountability of governments to citizens. | Realist evaluation is a theory-driven approach to evaluating programs and policies that asks not simply 'does it work?' but 'what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why?'. Developed by Ray Pawson and Nick Tilley in their 1997 book Realistic Evaluation, it treats interventions as theories incarnate: programs offer resources or opportunities that trigger underlying mechanisms of reasoning and response in participants, and those mechanisms only fire in particular contexts. The unit of analysis is the Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) configuration, and the goal is to build and refine middle-range theory that explains differential outcomes across settings. |
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