Evaluation handbook: 2025 edition

The Evaluation Handbook – 2025 Edition reflects the European Commission’s steadfast commitment to promoting a culture of results, accountability, and learning across the EU’s external action. As one of the world’s leading development and international cooperation actors, the European Commission bears a particular responsibility to ensure that its interventions are informed by robust evidence, deliver tangible results, and represent the highest standards of transparency and effectiveness in the use of public funds. Building on the foundations laid by the 2024 edition— which itself constituted a major revision of the 2006 Methodology Guidance—the 2025 edition reflects the continuous evolution of the European Commission’s evaluation practice over the past two decades. It draws on international best practices, incorporates state-of-the-art methodological advances, and acknowledges the increasingly multifaceted nature of development cooperation. This Handbook is attuned to the dynamic policy, institutional, and geopolitical environment in which EU external action operates, offering an adaptive and forward-looking framework to support high-quality evaluations that are both credible and consequential. This Handbook reaffirms evaluation as an indispensable pillar of the EU’s commitment to better regulation, performance-based management, and evidence-informed decision-making. It provides practical and strategic guidance to support evaluation managers, partners, and stakeholders in navigating the full evaluation cycle—from design and implementation to dissemination and uptake of findings.