2017 was an important year in development. Globally, attention continued to focus on key issues, including climate change, inequality, fragility and war, among others. Within the World Bank Group, progress was made on several fronts related to these themes. Among them was the Forward Look, which outlines the Bank Group’s vision through 2030, a renewed focus on serving the world’s poorest countries following the successful IDA18 replenishment, the launch of a new cascade approach for maximizing finance for development, and IFC’s 3.0 strategy, which looks to reposition the institution as a leader in creating markets and mobilizing private investment.

Here on the #WhatWorks blog, we explored many of these themes by looking at their implications and likely opportunities for the World Bank Group and the broader development community.  We drew insights from several new evaluations we completed during 2017, including assessments of the World Bank Group’s contributions toward mobilizing tax revenue, data for development, urban transport, pollution, and higher education.  We also presented our findings related to the Bank Group’s progress and ability to manage for results, in addition to reporting the results and performance of the World Bank Group itself (both were derived from the 2016 Results and Performance of the World Bank Group report).

In a special blog series, Rethinking Evaluation, we started a debate on the need to revisit the established evaluation criteria that most development institutions follow today. It was gratifying to see the huge response that this blog series generated – over 10,000 unique views and close to 130 comments.

On the subject of evaluation capacity development and methodologies, we had several contributions from IEG experts, who covered the ins and outs of mixed methods, evaluability, and attribution. We also looked at Evaluation for policy-making and discussed the need to examine quality, ethical, and technical issues involved with third party monitoring.

We took a closer look at two recent IEG working papers on the evaluation of service delivery and behavior change.

Finally, we embarked on an exploration of the implications of rapidly-evolving information and telecommunications technologies (ICT) on the field of evaluation in our ICT and Evaluation series.

In the coming year, expect to hear more from us about our new evaluation framework, recent and upcoming evaluations on shared prosperity, water and sanitation, the growing rural non-farm economy, citizen engagement, health services, and renewable energy.

Most importantly, thank you for being an important part of our outreach network – your comments, feedback, and ideas are always appreciated.  We are very encouraged by the very salient and informed opinions we’ve seen among our comments this past year, and we hope you’ve noticed that we’ve taken the time to respond as often as we can.  The feedback and dialogue sparked by this year’s Rethinking Evaluation series in particular was of tremendous value to the evaluation community as a whole, bringing in a wide variety of perspectives as well as new ideas to our evolving profession.

Please keep the comments coming, and give us your thoughts as to what you’d like to see from #WhatWorks in the coming year!

See highlights from this year's #WhatWorks posts in the timeline below.