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Evaluating Country Programmes
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In some agencies the CPE is an internal document, circulated only within a very
restricted circle and not discussed in any depth with the partner country. However,
donor staff noted that even when a conscious effort is made to provide the partner
government with the findings of a CPE, the partner typically makes little if any use of
it. As a result, accountability to actors outside the donor organisation is mainly
defined in terms of accountability to the donor government and general public. Bilateral
donors may have a policy, written or established in practice, of disseminating
CPE reports to Parliament for discussion or publishing the findings for public consultation.
In some donors (e.g. the IMF), the Board commissions, supervises and receives
evaluations. In others (e.g. IDB), the Board does not commission or supervise, but
does receive and discuss evaluation reports. This raises questions about the relationship
between evaluation and country programming. For example, until recently,
the Board of IDB received both evaluation reports and country programme documents
– but the two were handled by different sub-committees, with limited overlap.
Summary
On the basis of these distinctions it is possible to construct a rough typology of
CPEs on the basis of their rationale (when rationale is defined in terms of the goals
that are tested and use that is to be made of the results). This typology can be presented
in the form of a matrix (Table 2.4). Selected examples are provided: taken
together, all twenty-five of the CPEs reviewed in this study filled only six of the possible
nine cells (i.e. no cases matched the theoretical case of a historical, projectfocused
CPE). In practice most of the CPEs we examined straddled the boundaries
between one or more cells: for illustrative purposes, however, a subjective judgement
has been made as to which cell any given CPE best fits.
Table 2.4. Typology of country programme evaluations, classified by rationale
Relationship to planning cycle
Weak: Intermediate: Strong:
Historical CPE, Pronounced historical forward-looking CPE,
Level of goals major part of conclusions review element combined intended primarily
concern explanation with specific programming as input to planning
of past performance recommendations
Project/component UNDP (Uganda
and Sri Lanka)
Country programme Norad/Nicaragua World Bank CARs
UNDP (Myanmar)
World Bank CANs
Agency-wide/global Danida/Nepal Netherlands/Bangladesh
Source: Authors.
OECD 1999