Evaluating Country Programmes - OECD Online Bookshop

OECD 1999
Country Programme Evaluation: Synthesis Report from the Workshop
Programme Evaluation in Tanzania (see Chapter 4). By corollary, if mishandled, a
Country Programme Evaluation can make stakeholders feel excluded and damage
the relationships necessary for success in country programming.
A CPE can itself serve as part of the aid delivered through the country programme:
the research process and the presentation and discussion of conclusions
can provide an opportunity for donor and partner government to clarify their perspectives
and positions. One partner country participant noted that one donor’s
CPE can also throw light on the work of many donors working in the same country.
CPEs should be seen as an episodic but integral element of country programming.
If there are strong arguments for partnership, there are also practical limitations
to the degree of effective co-operation between donor and partner which can
be achieved. As in other forms of evaluation, the meaning of participation in Country
Programme Evaluation must be carefully specified. There are many potential
partners, who may not necessarily agree in their judgements on the strengths and
weaknesses of a given country programme. The perspectives of the partner government,
through which the majority of ODA is still channelled, may be different from
the perspectives of those who are intended to be the ultimate beneficiaries of aid,
namely the civil population (and especially the poor).
In reality, differences in opinion between different partners may be more complex
than this. Neither states nor civil societies are ever monolithic: different segments of
the state (politicians, line ministries, local government) and society (ethnic groups,
classes, regions, occupational groups, businesses, NGOs) will have different ideas
and capacities which they can bring to the partnership with the donor (whether in
implementation or evaluation). There is a need to think in more detail about what
is meant by partnership, who are the partners in the country programme and who
could be the partners in Country Programme Evaluation (ideally but not necessarily
the same actors), and how they might participate in evaluation.
This point is developed well in the review of practices in the MDBs
(see Chapter 5). It was noted that country ownership of the country programme
and Country Programme Evaluation (which implies a more significant transfer of
power than “partnership”) is an essential but complex process involving “social
buy-in, government accountability and political legitimacy” (MDBs Evaluation
Co-operation Group, 1999: 5).
The degree of partnership which can be achieved in researching, writing and
acting upon a Country Programme Evaluation is also limited by the nature of the
CPE itself. The donor pays for the CPE exercise which, whatever else it may be, is
conceived as a management tool to be used by the donor to improve both the
country programme in question and (through more generalisable lessons about
concept, design and implementation) agency-wide approach and management. 18 A
CPE is also intended as a means by which to hold bilateral agencies accountable to
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