Innovación colaborativa y construcción de capacidades como estrategia de institucionalización de la evaluación en Andalucía. El Grupo de Personas Colaboradoras en Evaluación de Políticas Públicas.

The purpose of this article is to describe the progress made in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia regarding policy evaluation. It emphasises the innovative nature of the strategic policy that has been implemented to build a policy evaluation system in a collaborative manner. It is based on the knowledge, experience and evaluation capacity building of the staff of the Junta de Andalucía itself, the regional government of Andalusia. Based on documental analysis, surveys by the author and participant observation this article presents a legislative review of the state of evaluation in Andalusia, the role of the Andalusian Government Institute and, within it the Policy Evaluation Department and especially, the crucial role of the Collaborative Group of Policy Evaluation. Currently, this group is still operative and has a significant impact on the institutionalization of the evaluation in Andalusia. This experience shows that this kind of collaborative and interdisciplinary work is achieving excellent results, that the government has talented and motivated professionals, ready to work collaboratively for the improvement of the organisation and that this strategy can be easily replicable in other regional governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]