howard white provides a critique of this approach
Results-based management has become a fact of life for development agencies. They might hope to learn from the experience of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) which has already gone down this road. It is indeed instructive that USAID has come back up the road again saying ‘there’s nothing down there’. But development agencies have been rightly criticised in the past for paying too little attention to the final impact of their activities, so we would like to support a results-based approach. But we should not do so blindly when it suffers from the severe limitations outlined below. Serious attempts to link agency performance to developmental outcomes must rely upon the log-frame. The log-frame is not a universal panacea but, used properly, can force agencies into a critical examination of the nature of their programmes and projects, and the results they achieve.
This posting is available in full at the Euforic website
