Governing through Evaluations? The Role of Evaluations in Global Development Discourse and Practice

Evaluations play an increasingly important role in global development. On the one hand, national and international development organisations are using evaluations more than ever to assess the effectiveness and impact of their work. On the other hand, evaluations are increasingly promoted on a global scale by international organisations, states, and scientific evaluation networks. This is, for example, visible in the promotion of “Evaluation Capacity Development” whereby developing countries are supported to build evaluation capacities to assess their own development. While there exists much research on how evaluations should be implemented in order to arrive at verifiable and evidence-based outcomes, a critical perspective that asks how evaluations are used and what social and political effects they have for global development is mostly neglected by political scientists and sociologists. In this paper, I take up such a perspective and explore how international development organisations and scientific evaluation networks present the role and value of evaluations for global development. In particular, I am interested in how current efforts of promoting evaluations work as a governance strategy, how to conceptualise this way of governing through evaluations and what consequences this has for the field of global development. The paper is structured into three parts: First, I shortly trace the history of evaluations in development focusing on how they emerged, evolved and diffused in development discourse and practice. Second, I explore how the promotion of Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD) by international development organizations works as a way of governing in global development. I use a governmentality framework to analyse key documents by the OECD, the World Bank, and the UNDP that set out the programmatic agenda for ECD. In particular, I focus on four dimensions: problematisation (what is the problem to which ECD is the answer to?), political rationality (what is the logic that underlies the promotion of ECD?), political technology (which mechanisms are used to implement ECD?) and formation of subjectivities (what identities are created in the discourse on ECD?). I argue that ECD can be best understood as a form of global governmentality that works through the careful allowance of regulated freedom: It enables countries to evaluate themselves but also sets out the parameters of how to conceive of successful development in the first place Third, I take up a critical perspective and investigate some problematic issues concerning the promotion of evaluations. I argue that this governance strategy reflects current structures of inequality between donors and partner countries while also entailing the danger of depoliticising development.