Books by Olaf Rieper

Knowledge grows as ideas are tested against each other. Agreement is not resolved simply by naming concepts but in the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This book includes many echoes of these debates. It offers a comprehensive treatise on evidence based policy.

Great intellectual effort has gone into the development of sophisticated designs and methodologies to study individual policies, programs, and projects

To understand local responsibilities and requirements, one must also understand the role that regional and national governmental agencies and administrations play. Politics and Practices of Intergovernmental Evaluation is a landmark work in the area of the evaluation of intergovernmental policies, programs, and projects. Comparative and cross-national in its perspective, the material presented here not only provides a systematic theoretical and empirical treatment of intergovernmental evaluation, but does so with case material from seven nations and the European Union. No other such comparative work exists on this topic. Politics and Practices of Intergovernmental Evaluation will be of interest to political theorists, policy-makers, and scholars and students of government and the evaluation community.

Digital Governance://Networked Societies – Creating Authority, Community and Identity in a Globalized World explores the role of the Internet in the creation and reconfiguration of political authority, community and identity in a globalizing world.A string of case studies demonstrates how the Internet and connectivity facilitate the creation of political authorities ‘within’ and ‘beyond’ the nation state, and how it lies at the core of the formation of automated forms of power and the emergence of a plethora of communities with global reach and outlook, affecting identity formation processes and social dynamics.These developments have important repercussions for politics and democracy. Politics in the Information Age becomes a ‘politics of presence’ and a ‘politics of becoming’, as expressed through multiple practices, connections and organizational forms, as well as the complex formation of political identities. In such a set-up, democracy comes to depend more on ethics and less on procedures.