Confronting the Contradiction - An Exploration into the dual purpose of accountability and learning in aid evaluation

Evaluation is a firmly rooted practice in international development cooperation. It is part and parcel of established routines in order to learn from experience and improve future undertakings. Evaluations also satisfy the need for accountability, i.e. ensuring that dedicated resources, whether they be human, financial or other, are well spent. At the same time, some argue that it is problematic for evaluation as currently practiced to contribute to both learning and accountability. In this EBA report three researchers from the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Oslo, Hilde Reinertsen, Kristian Bjørkdahl and Desmond McNeill have explored the dual nature of aid evaluation. They have looked at aid evaluations in Norway and Sweden over the last forty years.

Their main conclusion is that “the dual purpose of accountability and learning in practice causes difficult trade-offs”. And their blunt assessment is that “learning is crowded out by accountability”. If we really want to promote learning, they suggest, maybe we should structure the evaluation process rather differently. In fact, maybe we should limit the engagement of external consultants and do away with formal evaluation reports! On the other hand, they also suggest, if the most important aspect of an evaluation is accountability, the evaluation process might be structured rather differently as well. However, in evaluation practice a clear distinction between learning and accountability is rarely made – and in the effort to kill two birds with one stone, those that commission evaluations end up only wounding the two birds with no clear view of the real benefit from this.