La science régionale et la performance des politiques publiques: retour sur les méthodes d'évaluation

In a context of severe budgetary constraints for local and regional authorities, the question of the effectiveness of policies is a hot topic. The evaluation of regional public policies is the subject of numerous academic studies in the field of humanities and social sciences. However, many methodological problems persist among which we find the validity and the role of the quantitative and qualitative methods, the nature of the causalities, the quality of the data exploited and their refinement, the multidimensionality of the phenomena addressed by the policies and of their objectives. In this framework, this article aims to introduce the special issue devoted to the problems and challenges of Regional Science in the evaluation of public policies, as these emerge from the experiences of researchers.