Prior to 1995, there were fewer than half a dozen regional and national evaluation organizations around the world. Today there are more than fifty, attesting to a growing interest in the practice of program evaluation internationally. Many of these new organizations have undertaken efforts to develop their own standards or to modify existing sets, most typically, the Program Evaluation Standards of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, for use in their own cultural context. Following two introductory chapters, one a conceptual overview and the second a history of the development and revisions of the Program Evaluation Standards, this issue documents standards development efforts in three different settings: Western Europe, Africa, and Australasia. In addition, because nongovernmental organizations and governments have entered the standard-setting business, other chapters describe standards development activities by the European Commission and CARE International.
The content points to the challenge of formalizing standards for program evaluation given cross-cultural differences in values and to the continuing challenges related to implementing voluntary standards. This is the 104th issue of the quarterly journal "New Directions for Evaluation".