people to bring about some kind of change. It
supports a decision or objective they already
have. The extent to which you manipulate the
evidence or not is up for discussion. Let me give
an example from the UK. When Labour came into
power in 1997 they started to support multilateral
agencies, particularly ILO and UNESCO, but
when the Conservatives came back in they did an
evidence based review of the effectiveness of these
multilateral agencies. Surprise, surprise… ILO and
UNESCO were not effective so they stopped funding
them again. The review was used to support a
political decision which had already been made.
However, I do think an accumulation of evaluation
findings can shift things in an environment in which
a policy maker is sensitive to external pressure
and when the wider circumstances are fruitful for
evaluations to have an influence. For instance,
in the 1980s an increasing number of evaluation
reports on the negative impacts of large dams
were produced. The shift of disciplinary influence,
particularly the reduced political influence of
engineers in the large aid agencies, and the
increased civil society concern about the effect
of dams on people and environment constituted
an enabling environment for the uptake of the
recommendations of the evaluation reports.
E2C: Given your concerns about potential
misuse of evaluation and results, should we
pay more attention to who sets the evaluation
questions and whose realities count?
R.: Yes, and that is why I am really interested in
this issue. This whole results and evidence agenda
shapes the kind of programs that donors are
prepared to fund. It is the effect upon what gets
funded that interests me and what I refer to as ‘the
tail wagging the dog’. By and large, I do not think
evaluations get used anyhow so I wasn’t bothered
about what gets done, but my concern was that the
evaluation design in the end drives what people do.
E2C: So what do you hope or expect for the
future?
R.: Actually, I am encouraged because the purpose
of the Big Push Forward initiative is to get people
talking about all of this politics of evidence and results
publicly. A few years ago, the evidence and result
discourses were so dominant that it almost felt like
an illegitimate subject. We want to make it okay to
move from hegemony back to ideology along the
continuum by creating a public space to discuss and
offer alternatives.
Lisa Popelier
The International Year of
Evaluation at IOB
The EvalYear did not remain unnoticed at IOB, which seized the moment to organise a
short training initiative to strengthen national M&E capacities and use. The training was
attended by members of nine different national Evaluation Societies, namely Mexico,
Uganda, Indonesia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Jordan, Burkina Faso, Zambia and Kenya. During
the training session participants made a diagnosis of their country’s M&E system and
a SWOT analysis of their National Evaluation Society, which they presented during a
livestreamed presentation on the final day.
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