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Evaluation systems are slowly making inroads in South African municipalities, particularly in the metros, yet their effective utilisation remains uneven across service delivery programmes. This study investigates the barriers affecting the uptake of evaluation in implementing the Indigent Programme Exit Strategy within the City of Tshwane (CoT) Metropolitan Municipality. Despite the strategic intent of the exit strategy to reduce long-term dependency and promote self-sufficiency among beneficiaries, the study finds that evaluation evidence is rarely used to inform decisions related to the strategy's design, implementation, or review. Instead, reliance is placed on administrative reporting and compliance-driven monitoring data, which limits learning, adaptation, and accountability. Using a qualitative case study approach grounded in institutional and systems theory, the study draws on semi-structured interviews and document analysis to identify key barriers, including weak political incentives for evaluation use, limited integration of evaluation processes into decision-making cycles, and inadequate feedback loops between evaluators, implementers, and policymakers. The findings underscore that the challenge is not the absence of M&E systems but rather the underutilisation of evaluation evidence to inform programmatic change. The article concludes by offering context-sensitive recommendations for enhancing evaluation uptake within municipal exit strategies and related interventions, contributing broader lessons for strengthening evidence use in local governance.

The focus of this paper is on public administration as a discipline and a distinct body of knowledge concerned with the ontological and epistemological realities of monitoring and evaluation. This study will provide a brief account of the evolution of the field of Public Administration in connection to the ontological realities of M&E policy processes in order to provide context for the current thesis on M&E policy processes. As a precursor to the current study's methodological approach and emphasis on the need for M&E policy practice in South Africa, the paper provides the historical epistemological and ontological foundations of the discipline of Public Administration. In this light, the paper will seek to unveil the historical trends in the epistemological and ontological philosophical aspects of the discipline of Public Administration thus offering a scholarly anchor for the paper. Against this setback, this conceptual paper seeks to explore the prospects and challenges of monitoring and evaluations contribution to Public Administration discourse.