Promoting Country-led Development Evaluation What is the role of donors?

1. Promoting Country-led Development Evaluation What is the role of donors? Hans Lundgren June 2009

2. Overview • The country evaluation context • Donor role • Partnership and ownership • Evaluation capacity development • Ways forward

3. The country context • Evaluation demand related to domestic accountability needs • The evaluation agenda in country will relate to the broader environment of governance, transparency requirements, and debate (or lack of it) on the effectiveness of public service and investments • Aid to developing countries  donor role

4. How can donors support? • Improving donor coordination and harmonisation, e.g. evaluation plan inventory • Promoting joint and partner-led evaluation work • Supporting evaluation capacity development and provide incentives for evaluation • Aligning with partner evaluation plans/needs and using country systems • Sharing experience, guidance and norms

5. Promoting or undermining ownership? • Intended and unintended consequences of evaluation practice and processes • Meeting needs of both partners and donors – not always feasible but possible more often than thought • Partnership must move beyond passive participation  ownership of evaluation agenda, design, process • Why are there not more partner-led evaluations of donor programmes? Accountability asymmetry.

6. What is evaluation capacity? • Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD): unleashing, strengthening and maintaining evaluation capacity. • Evaluation system: from setting the agenda to technical skills, demand for evaluation, design, feedback and learning, etc. • 3 Levels of capacity:

7. Resources • Fact finding study on ECD (DAC/Japan, 2006) • Member and partner country experiences • Work by MDBs and UN, studies by IEG • IOCE publication “Creating and Developing Evaluation Organisations” • DAC’s Good Practice document on Capacity Development (2006) • UNICEF et al, “Country-led monitoring and evaluation systems” (2008) • Evaluation tools, norms & standards

8. Key emerging lessons • An evaluation system needs to meet a country’s own learning and accountability needs. • Donors can support, not export: capacity development processes must be country-led and tailored.

9. Lessons (continued) • Build capacity by doing joint evaluation work that meets partner (as well as donor) learning and accountability needs. • Address supply and demand for evaluation (i.e. use by policy makers) to ensure evaluations are used

10. How do we move forward? • Change the way evaluations are planned and implemented – applying the Paris Declaration agenda to evaluation • Explicitly consider the evaluation capacity dimension during the evaluation process • Link with partners and find opportunities to collaborate in joint and partner-led work • Direct and context-specific evaluation capacity development support • Share experiences in collaborative networks

11. Your comments and suggestions are welcome! Hans.Lundgren@OECD.org www.oecd.org/DAC/EvaluationNetwork