Archive for May, 2011

The Elusive Craft of Evaluating Advocacy

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Original paper by Steven Teles, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, and Mark Schmitt, Roosevelt Institute. Published with support provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Found courtesy of @alb202 A version of this paper was published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review  in May 2011 and is available ...

Cost-Benefit Analysis in World Bank Projects

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

by Andrew Warner, Independent Evaluation Group, June 2010. Available as pdf Cost-benefit analysis used to be one of the World Bank?’s signature issues. It helped establish its reputation as the knowledge Bank and served to demonstrate its commitment to measuring results and ensuring accountability to taxpayers. It was the Bank’s answer ...

Evaluating Legislation and Other Non-Expenditure Instruments in the Area of Information Society and Media

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

March 2011, DG INFORMATION SOCIETY AND MEDIA [This manual]"... addresses the pressing need for more guidance in evaluating legislation, which will become an increasingly important part of the [EC] policy officers' work in the coming years, just as impact assessment is now. More focus on evaluation should be ...

MECHANISM EXPERIMENTS AND POLICY EVALUATIONS

Monday, May 30th, 2011

  Jens Ludwig, Jeffrey R. Kling, Sendhil Mullainathan, Working Paper 17062 , NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, May 2011 pdf copy available A mechanism experiment is "an experiment that does not test a policy, but one which tests a causal mechanism that underlies a policy" ABSTRACT Randomized controlled trials ...

“Intelligence is about creating and adjusting stories”

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

...says Gregory Treverton, in his Prospect article "What should we expect of our spies?" , June 2011 RD comment: How do you assess the performance of intelligence agencies, in the way they collect and make sense of the world around them? How do you explain their failure to predict some of ...

Evidence of the effectiveness of evidence?

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

Heart + Mind? Or Just Heart? Experiments in Aid Effectiveness (And a Contest!) by Dean Karlan 05/27/2011 | 4:00 pm Found courtesy of @poverty_action RD comment: There is a killer assumption behind many of the efforts being made to measure aid effectiveness - that evidence of the effectiveness of specific aid ...

Good Enough Guide to Impact Measurement – Rapid Onset Natural Disasters

Friday, May 27th, 2011

[from the Emergency Capacity Building Project website] Published on 6 April 2011 The Department for International Development (DfID / UKAID) awarded a grant for the ECB Project to develop a new Good Enough Guide to Impact Measurement. Lead by Dr. Vivien Walden from Oxfam, a team of ECB specialists from CRS, Save ...

Tools and Methods for Evaluating the Efficiency of Development Interventions

Friday, May 27th, 2011

Palenberg, M. (2011),  Evaluation Working Papers. Bonn: Bundesministe-rium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung. Available as pdf. Foreword: Previous BMZ Evaluation Working Papers have focused on measuring impact. The present paper explores approaches for assessing efficiency. Efficiency is a powerful concept for decision making and ex-post assessments of development interventions but, nevertheless, often ...

The “Real Book” for story evaluation methods

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

Marc Maxson, Irene Guijt, and others, 2010. GlobalGiving Foundation (supported by Rockefeller Foundation). Available as pdf.  See also the related website. ["Real Book" = The Real Book is a central part of the culture of playing music where improvisation is essential. Real books are not for beginners: the reader interprets scant ...

Synthesis Study of DFID’s Strategic Evaluations 2005 – 2010

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

  A report produced for the Independent Commission for Aid Impact by Roger Drew, January 2011. Available as pdf. Summary S1. This report examined central evaluations of DFID’s work published from 2006 to 2010. This included: - 41 reports of the International Development Committee (IDC) - Two Development Assistance Committee (DAC) peer reviews - 10 National Audit ...