DEval Policy Brief 9/2018: The OECD DAC evaluation criteria: To reform or to transform?

Few other initiatives to harmonise international development cooperation (DC) have become as effective as the five evaluation criteria adopted by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1991. Assessing the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability of a development intervention has provided valuable contributions to development evaluation but also to planning and implementation.

Four functions characterise the benefits of the criteria catalogue:

• The reference function has provided a framework of comparison committed to neutrality, which is consulted as the basis for the independent evaluation of DC measures;

• The incentive function has created incentives to design and implement interventions along key criteria of development effectiveness;

• The learning function has compared measures along the same evaluation criteria and thus created learning potential through the possibility of aggregating and disseminating knowledge;

• The in-depth function has sought to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of an intervention from its relevance to the sustainability of its results.