Borrowed from educational sciences, “learning” is a concept that resonates greatly throughout management studies. Recent years have witnessed growing debate about the usefulness of public sector bodies being depicted as learning organisations (Senge, 1991). Research in this domain has generally presented organisational learning - itself proximate to the construct of a learning organisation - as a lever (or even a model) for reforming public organisations (Jorgensen, 2004). The idea here has been to rethink public policy-making and action in a way that places greater emphasis on practice, practitioners and participatory approaches. A first step towards this goal is to create a climate conducive to learning and new ways of thinking. It is a view that depicts evaluation as an enabling factor that both nurtures dialogue and scrutinises current practice, thereby contributing to the collective production of new organisational knowledge (Nonaka 1994). The four articles présented contributions have in common is the questions they raise regarding the tensions that can arise between reference frameworks and practice. They invite readers to come up with other ways of looking at public sector organisations, ones more geared towards the latter’s learning culture; and towards the learning practices and situations where evaluations have a role to play.