Evaluation of public policies: is interdisciplinarity necessary?

Summary In this contribution, we will try to answer the question: what is the need for multiple insights into public policy by different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, i.e. interdisciplinarity? Is it necessary to go as far as the blurring of disciplinary boundaries in the case of transdisciplinarity? This question must be asked because, although there is a fairly extensive literature on evaluation and interdisciplinarity outside of economics, and evaluation methodologies have long been developed within economics, economics has not really taken up this question of interdisciplinarity: it seems to have enough to do with resolving the debates between controlled experiments and structural model estimations.