278 - Principle focused evaluation for a comprehensive city-level community welfare policy in Japan

Abstract Information: The evaluation of social welfare policies attracts the attention of policymakers and social work practitioners in a welfare state. However, they face challenges in terms of observing the impact of social work and community interventions. People’s basic needs and contexts are becoming increasingly complex in modern society, leading to changes in policy modalities. In Japan, a country where rapid aging and a decrease in birth rate has led to a low population growth, the number of cases in which local governments cannot provide services as before has increased, especially in the countryside due to staff shortages. This situation significantly influences residents’ daily lives and welfare. The national government has taken this into account and has worked on developing comprehensive social welfare policies constructing governance of multi-sectoral collaboration so that local governments can utilize resources more effectively and support cases that have been previously unsuccessful due to silo approaches. However, this “comprehensive” approach makes evaluation more challenging because in a general policy evaluation, many programs and projects are usually related to a single policy. It is unusual to evaluate comprehensive policies, including the Multilayered Support System Development Program (MSSDP), and no effective evaluation approach has been established. Therefore, we attempted to develop evaluation approaches as part of this comprehensive policy evaluation. Specifically, we applied principles-focused evaluation (P-FE) for community welfare practice, which is a part of the MSSDP evaluation in one of the cities adapting the MSSDP as a city-level social service provision and collaboration design. The evaluation process involved local citizens, local government officials, community social work practitioners, members of the Social Welfare Council, and other community stakeholders in a sequence of evaluation workshops. The three workshops were conducted between November 2023 and March 2024. Through these collective activities, participants developed a tentative theory of change (TOC) and discussed core principles to achieve the outcomes described in the TOC in alignment with the GUIDE framework. While the established principles will be used in the evaluation activities in the 2024FY, some participants articulated that the process of creating and discussing principles was invaluable because even though people with diverse backgrounds were convened, they found common ground to achieve a better community. In addition, some commented that the principles could contribute to changing people’s mindsets and behavior, which would improve citizens’ initiatives and empowerment. Since there are no cases in which P-FE has been implemented as part of policy evaluation in Japan, this case study will be insightful by examining the process of developing principles and their evaluation.