Impact Evaluation in Practice Gertler, Paul; Martinez, Sebastian; Premand, Patrick ...
2010, 12-13-2010, 20110101
eBook
Open access
This book offers an accessible introduction to the topic of impact evaluation and its practice in development. While the book is geared principally towards development practitioners and policymakers ...designing prospective impact evaluations, we trust that it will be a valuable resource for students and others interested in using impact evaluation. Prospective impact evaluations should be used selectively to assess whether or not a program has achieved its intended results, or to test alternatives for achieving those results. We consider that more and better impact evaluation will help strengthen the evidence base for development policies and programs around the world. If governments and development practitioners can make policy decisions based on evidence - including evidence generated through impact evaluation - our hope is that development resources will be spent more effectively, and ultimately have a greater impact on reducing poverty and improving people?s lives. The three chapters in this handbook provide a non-technical introduction to impact evaluations, including ?Why Evaluate? in Chapter 1, ?How to Evaluate? in Chapter 2 and ?How to Implement Impact Evaluations? in Chapter 3. These elements are the basic ?tools? needed in order to successfully carry out an impact evaluation. From a methodological standpoint our approach to impact evaluation is largely pragmatic: we think that the most appropriate methods should be identified to fit the operational context, and not the other way around. This is best achieved at the outset of the program, through the design of prospective impact evaluation that can be built into the project?s implementation. We argue that gaining consensus between key stakeholders and identifying an evaluation design that fits the political and operational context is as important as the method itself. We also believe
strongly that impact evaluations should be upfront about their limitations and caveats. Finally, we strongly encourage policymakers and program managers to consider impact evaluations in a logical framework that clearly sets out the causal pathways by which the program works to produce outputs and influence final outcomes, and to combine impact evaluations with monitoring and selected complementary evaluation approach to gain a full picture of performance.This book builds on a core set of teaching materials developed for the ?Turning Promises to Evidence? workshops organized by the office of the Chief Economist for Human Development (HDNCE) in partnership with regional units and the Development Economics Research Group (DECRG) at the World Bank.
Challenges, Lessons, and Prospects for Operationalizing Regional Projects in Asia: Legal and Institutional Aspects is part of the World Bank Studies Series. These papers are published to communicate ...the results of the Bank's ongoing research and to stimulate public discourse. For the past decade and a half, international development organizations have been making continual efforts to finance multi-country projects with regional goals. Despite their efforts, the structure of intervention through such projects has not been easy to design and implement. Experience shows that one of the reasons for this is the lack of clarity in the enabling legal framework and tools, both within the client countries as well as the development organizations. Against this backdrop, this study is born of a need for more precise and comprehensive information about the legal and institutional aspects involved in designing regional projects. Based essentially on desk research and with limited field consultation, it attempts to discuss-primarily from legal and institutional perspectives???the tools, prospects, and opportunities for designing and implementing regional projects. Paying particular focus on the emerging practice of the World Bank, and with a special reference to the Asia region, the study reviews the framework for regional projects in which international development organizations operate, the problems they face, and the possibilities they provide for countries that rely on international financing for their development. Challenges, Lessons, and Prospects for Operationalizing Regional Projects in Asia: Legal and Institutional Aspects outlines the general structures of regional projects and discusses the World Bank approach toward regional projects, the importance of political will and commitment, the general legal structures for regional projects, the uniqueness
and challenges for Asia, and makes some proposals for consideration in developing regional projects. The study will be of particular interest to development professionals working in the context of regional projects and anyone interested in how legal and institutional structures impact project development. World Bank Studies are available individually or on standing order. The World Bank Studies series is also available online through the World Bank eLibrary (www.worldbank.org/elibrary).
Rough Watersexplores one of the most crucial problems of the contemporary era--struggles over access to, and use of, the environment. It combines insights from anthropology, history, and ...environmental studies, mounting an interdisciplinary challenge to contemporary accounts of "globalization." The book focuses on The Mafia Island Marine Park, a national park in Tanzania that became the center of political conflict during its creation in the mid-1990s. The park, reflecting a new generation of internationally sponsored projects, was designed to encourage environmental conservation as well as development. Rather than excluding residents, as had been common in East Africa's mainland wildlife parks, Mafia Island was intended to represent a new type of national park that would encourage the participation of area residents and incorporate their ideas.
While the park had been described in the project's general management plan as "for the people and by the people," residents remained excluded from the most basic decisions made about the park. The book details the day-to-day tensions and alliances that arose among Mafia residents, Tanzanian government officials, and representatives of international organizations, as each group attempted to control and define the park. Walley's analysis argues that a technocentric approach to conservation and development can work to the detriment of both poorer people and the environment. It further suggests that the concept of the global may be inadequate for understanding this and other social dramas in the contemporary world.
For decades, policy-makers in government, development banks and foundations, NGOs, researchers and students have struggled with the problem of how to protect people who are displaced from their homes ...and livelihoods by development projects. This book addresses these concerns and explores how debates often become deadlocked between 'managerial' and 'movementist' perspectives. Using development ethics to determine the rights and responsibilities of various stakeholders, the authors find that displaced people must be empowered so as to share equitably in benefits rather than being victimized. They propose a governance model for development projects that would transform conflict over displacement into a more manageable collective bargaining process and would empower displaced people to achieve equitable results. Their book will be valuable for readers in a wide range of fields including ethics, development studies, politics and international relations as well as policy making, project management and community development.
Sensing changes Parr, Joy
Sensing changes,
c2010, 2009, 20100101
eBook
These narratives about state-driven megaprojects and technological and regulatory changes reveal how humans make sense of their world in the face of rapid environmental change.
When should foreign aid organizations empower actors on the front lines of delivery to rely on their judgment to guide aid interventions, and when should distant headquarters lead? Understanding how ...best to manage the implementation of aid projects matters both for aid effectiveness and for what it tells us about the more general tension between central versus field worker control in organizations.
InMonitoring Movements in Development Aid, Casper Jensen and Brit Winthereik consider the processes, social practices, and infrastructures that are emerging to monitor development aid, discussing ...both empirical phenomena and their methodological and analytical challenges. Jensen and Winthereik focus on efforts by aid organizations to make better use of information technology; they analyze a range ofdevelopment aid information infrastructurescreated to increase accountability and effectiveness. They find that constructing these infrastructures is not simply a matter of designing and implementing technology but entails forging new platforms for action that are simultaneously imaginative and practical, conceptual and technical. After presenting an analytical platform that draws on science and technology studies and the anthropology of development, Jensen and Winthereik present an ethnography- based analysis of the mutually defining relationship between aid partnerships and infrastructures; the crucial role of users (both actual and envisioned) in aid information infrastructures; efforts to make aid information dynamic and accessible; existing monitoring activities of an environmental NGO; and national-level performance audits, which encompass concerns of both external control and organizational learning.Jensen and Winthereik argue that central to the emerging movement to monitor development aid is the blurring of means and ends: aid information infrastructures are both technological platforms for knowledge about aid and forms of aid and empowerment in their own right.
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