Evaluating Country Programmes - OECD Online Bookshop

OECD 1999
Country Assistance Strategies as a Management and Evaluation Instrument for Donors
provisional budget and a project selection process to them if it is subsequently
impossible to monitor the achievement of strategic goals and to intervene when
discrepancies (beyond certain given tolerances) from the strategy are noted.
The introduction of country concepts has important consequences for the BMZ’s
monitoring responsibility. According to the Federal Government’s guidelines on
financial and technical co-operation and the BMZ’s operations schema used to plan
and monitor projects in the fields of financial and technical co-operation, the BMZ is
responsible for development policy-related (as opposed to technical) planning,
monitoring, and control of every single development co-operation project. The BMZ
consequently has a monitoring and control responsibility at the project level.
If the country concepts now require the formulation of a cross-project strategy
which integrates the individual projects for each priority area defined within them,
this establishes a monitoring responsibility at the priority-area level. The BMZ
guidelines for the country concepts thus logically state: “The preparation and
implementation of country concepts require the regional divisions to concentrate
more strongly on the central tasks of cross-project development planning, monitoring,
co-ordination, and control.” This does not question the BMZ’s monitoring
responsibility at project level, but it does make it clear that monitoring at project
level or the co-ordination of the set of development co-operation instruments in
use is not possible without monitoring at the level of priority areas and the goals
and strategies defined there.
The priority area level is an additional monitoring level which is advocated in
the guidelines for country concepts. This involves no additional work; it even
entails less for the regional divisions of the BMZ – which often claim to be overloaded
– when project monitoring is addressed in the context of the priority area
strategy. The relevance of goal discrepancies in individual projects is easier to
judge, and can above all be judged more substantively, when the preliminary question
asked is: To what extent does a goal discrepancy in an individual project jeopardise
the likelihood that the goal in the priority area (i.e. the structure-building
effects) will be achieved?
The monitoring and strategic control function of the country concepts
The country concepts fulfil their monitoring and strategic control function only
when they furnish corresponding pointers. In fact, this is also provided for in Chapter
3.3 of the country concepts (“Detailed presentation of priority areas”). The problem
is that this is neither stated explicitly in the guidelines nor, as the evaluation
has shown, perceived as such by a number of regional divisions.
Monitoring pointers are first of all target criteria that may require interventions
when discrepancies are noted. Target criteria or deviations from them may, to simplify,
be of three different types: the target criteria may be of a substantive,
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