The political economy of joint-donor evaluations

Abstract

Part of the justification for joint-donor evaluations is that they allow the conduct of relevant evaluations with a broader scope than single-donor evaluations and at the same time reduce transaction costs. Many joint-donor evaluations, however, run into management and coordination problems, have unforeseen high transaction costs for the donors and result in general conclusions and recommendations. The purpose of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the factors that influence how donor-evaluation units engage in joint evaluations and to identify mechanisms that can make them more effective. It represents a first step towards analysing joint evaluations using a political-economy perspective based on assumptions about the interests and incentives of donor management, evaluations units and evaluators. The article argues that the broader scope of many joint-donor evaluations and their relatively high transaction costs are closely related to and originate from differences in donor interests and incentive structures, and an insufficient focus on methodological challenges. The article concludes with a number of tentative operational suggestions based on the analyses.

Some Thoughts on Development Evaluation Processes

“…There are only a few attempts to operationalise the transaction cost perspective in connection with development evaluation (see e.g. Jobin 2008 andAndersen andBroegaard 2012).…”

“…11 See for example Andersen and Broegaard (2012), where further references can be found. 12 Apparently, there is an increasing interest for conducting analyses within this area, but usually without distinguishing between different kinds of development evaluations (see e.g.…”

“…Evaluation units are often either presented as neutral evaluation commissioners or it is argued that internal evaluation units are not autonomous in spite of various safeguards. These descriptions are obviously very general and do not in any detail reflect the behaviour of evaluation units and their staff or the complexity of the evaluation processes (see Andersen and Broegaard 2012). For instance, reasonable assumptions will be that the institutional set-up of the units will influence the behaviour of the staff, and that staff of evaluation units will also be guided by some degree of professionalism.…”

“…However, desperate attempts to write very detailed TOR may not solve the problem as they may not reflect what is feasible in a specific evaluation, for example due to insufficient information at the time of drafting the TOR. Evaluations with many questions may instead lead to evaluations with a lack of depth (ITAD 2014: 72) and very general conclusions and recommendations (Andersen and Broegaard 2012). A potential implication can also be that not all questions in the TOR can be answered adequately.…”

Things you Wanted to Know about Bias in Evaluations but Never Dared to Think

“…In the latter, in many but not all circumstances (see Piketty 2014), competition finds out weaknesses, so that evaluation practices which do not promote competitiveness are weeded out. While some authors put this down to a lack of genuine interest in evaluation (Pritchett 2002), others have attributed it to political economy explanations that characterise evaluations in terms of principal-agent problems (Andersen and Broegaard 2012). These approaches tend to depict the actual actors in development evaluations as dumb bearers of external logics rather than consciously deliberative choosers of their actions in the evaluation field (and elsewhere).…”