The Ethical Implications of Underfunding Development Evaluations - American Journal of Evaluation Vol. 31 No. 4

Each year a great many evaluations are conducted of international development efforts around the world. These development evaluations study projects, programs, country-wide portfolios, policy reform efforts, and other topics of interest to funders, governments, program managers, and other involved stakeholders. Although some of these evaluations are well funded, and while a rare evaluation might possibly even be overfunded, the majority of individual development evaluations are probably underfunded. This underfunding can produce several implications for a development evaluation: "logistical" implications such as the number of evaluators that can be involved and the amount of travel possible, "methodological" implications such as the types of study designs possible and the types and amount of data that can be gathered, and even "political" implications such as who can be involved in the evaluation, at what stages, and in what ways. Many of these implications are well known, especially among experienced development evaluators, but the authors wonder if there might also be one additional set of implications of this underfunding--implications which they believe have not been sufficiently discussed to date. Specifically, the authors wonder if there might also be "ethical" implications of underfunding development evaluations. This article focuses attention on what the authors are calling the microlevel (project and program level) ethical implications of the underfunding of individual development evaluations.