Evaluations keep raising the same concerns. Isn’t it time to move on?

Our Results and Performance Report (RAP) importantly flags concerns about performance trends in the World Bank Group (WBG) – in particular that the percentage of projects and country strategies with positive outcome ratings is steadily declining.

This is bad news at a time when the World Bank Group is implementing a new strategy that involves changes ranging from new targets and measurement systems, a revised organizational structure and tightened budgets.

But the results are not surprising. Previous independent evaluations flagged many of the issues identified in the RAP, which were also picked up in the diagnostic that management undertook in the lead up to the change process. Frankly, it would have been a shock if we had found something new, something that had not yet been taken into account.

The WBG Strategy speaks to a number of the problems that the RAP presents:

  • The Solutions Bank Group aims to increase the impact of the WBG and achieve greater results on the ground, by bringing together the wisdom and instruments of Bank Group institutions to counter declining performance trends;
     
  • The Country Engagement Model aims to intensify the focus on the toughest challenges, introduce greater selectivity, and deliver better solutions to client countries, again resulting in improved performance and better ownership of country strategies; and
     
  • The commitment to evidence-based decision-making should finally resolve the long-standing issue of poor results frameworks and monitoring and evaluation systems.
     

So, what is the promise that things will change? The jury is still out.

One of the risks is that the change agenda will be confined to the Group-wide strategy rather than producing change on the ground.

Let me use the example of a recent IEG evaluation about transport infrastructure which looked into the institutional and financial sustainability of infrastructure investments. This was also an old story. Many evaluations had warned that the lack of attention to operating and maintaining transportation infrastructure shortened the life of investments and reduced the benefits to people. But, the evaluation found something else: while at the highest level the Bank Group's Board had approved a strategy that paid the necessary attention to operations and maintenance this focus weakened in country strategies, further faded away in project design and implementation, and virtually vanished after completion.

Other evaluations tell similar stories. The RAP itself speaks of the difficulties of introducing results-oriented country strategies in 2006 that did not help overcome problems that, in the end, dragged down outcome ratings.

How then do we make sure that top-level commitments carry all the way through to client countries and have positive effects on people?

On IEG's part we will continue holding management accountable for the promises made in the strategy. As part of our new work program we will continuously check in on the change agenda, the progress in implementing the strategy, the results it produces, and the overall development effectiveness of the Bank Group. Our evaluations will still generate evidence and lessons that show what works and help the Bank accelerate its development results.

Once things have changed we will stop bringing out the old hats.

Comments

Submitted by Tony Tyrrell on Thu, 05/29/2014 - 00:44

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What might be regarded as old hat is repetition of the consequences of systemic or other dysfunction rather than explanation of why, specifically, it occurs in the first place. To be able to explain why things happen as they do requires the application of a broad range of evaluation techniques, getting closer to the action, and, critically, a conceptualization of the function or act of evaluation that is much broader than the technical, a conceptualization that leans, in fact, towards the political. After all, the long observed gap between policy and practice is not simply a technical issue, but one that presents a fundamental challenge to governance and legitimacy.

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