provided by Denis Jobin (IDEAS VP 2006-2009), in a posting on the MandE NEWS email list…
“Getting to Results: Evaluation Capacity Building and Development”
The IDEAS Global Assembly, Birchwood Hotel, Johannesburg, South Africa, March 17-20, 2009.
The International Development Evaluation Association‘s Global Assembly focused on the issues involved in evaluation capacity building, and how such efforts can strengthen the evidence available to countries to inform their own development. Capacity building has been recognized for a decade or more as crucial to development. The measurement (and management) issues embedded in generating and disseminating evaluative information are now understood to be critical to informing decision making. The Global Assembly explored these topics with the objective of clarifying present knowledge on evaluation capacity building, learning lessons from development evaluation experience, and understanding the challenges faced by development evaluators in taking these efforts forward.
The theme of the global assembly underscores the role that evaluative knowledge can play in development in general, and the importance of building and sustaining the capacity to bring evaluative knowledge into the decision making process so as to enhance the achievement of results.
The papers presented at the global assembly may be grouped according to several “themes”.We have provided below the links to those papers which we have been able to make available.
Building Evaluation Capacity in Response to the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action
This strand focuses on the commitments made in the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action to strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems in order to track development performance. Documents
Institutional capacity building
When the focus is on institutional capacity building, issues of supply versus demand in the public, private, and NGO/CSO sectors of society are immediately apparent. The role of evaluation associations, standards for evaluation performance, the role of credentials, national evaluation policies, and incentives for quality evaluations are all significant issues. Documents
Regional Responses/Regional Strategies for building Evaluation Capacity
This topic examines regional efforts and strategies being deployed to strengthen evaluation capacity. Documents
Country / Sector Specific Responses for Building Evaluation Capacity
Case Studies from a range of countries and organizations provide insight into different ways of building Capacity. Documents
Evaluation Capacity Building — Tools, Techniques, and Strategies
Capacity building involves multiple tools, techniques, and strategies. This topic examines the success (or not) of these different components of capacity building. Documents
The Measurement and Assessment of Evaluation Capacity Building
This topic examines the experiences and the efforts made to actually evaluate capacity building. The assessments describe and analyze the methodological choices and their implications. Qualitative, quantitative methods and mixed methods are analysed, and any unintended consequences are examined. Documents
Country-Led Evaluation
A series of case studies analyse and evaluate Monitoring and Evaluation efforts in a range of countries. Documents
