Governance and Impact Evaluation: The Role of Evaluation Networks In the Promotion of a Culture of Evaluation”

RODRÍGUEZ BILELLA, PABLO

El Cairo, Egipto

Conferencia; International Conference on Impact Evaluation for Development Effectiveness; 2009

Network of Networks of Impact Evaluation (NONIE)

The concept of governance has gained great popularity across most of the social sciences during the last decade, signalling a shift to a broad concern with a wide range of mechanisms with no presumption that these are anchored primarily in the sovereign state. Governance is broader than government, and it pays attention to the multiple ways in which governmental and non-governmental organisations interact, and to the ways in which political power and authority are distributed, both internal and external to the state. Governance studies have lately stressed that assessing sustainable development interventions entails understanding not only what a particular project has been able to change, but also how the project itself was in the process impacted upon by the conditions under which it operated. Impact should be seen in the light of how beneficiaries appropriate encounters -by their participation- with external realities-, while at the same time generating meaning about the relationships which emerge out of it. Studies of local governance are nowadays growing. They concentrate mainly on specific policy areas. Adopting a different perspective, in this paper I am interested in paying attention to the links between concrete practices and broader trends and processes in the relationship between the economy, the state, policy and society. Assuming a descriptive-analytical view of the governance perspective, I will argue about the usefulness of adopting an actor-oriented approach in order to shift the evaluation lens from looking at the outputs of local governance to looking at its processes -mainly from the perspective of those living in the local areas. In this way, a direct engagement with issues of participation will provide a key stimulus for a non-normative view of governance issues. Specifically, I want to advance the discussion of local governance and the evaluation culture in the context of Latin America, where evaluation is many times –at best- considered a luxury, and other times a necessary evil. In order to exemplify the degree of institutionalization of the practice of evaluation, I briefly introduce the process of a recent sustainable evaluation of a national rural policy in Argentina which clearly shows the characteristics of a poor evaluation culture as well as the difficulties of turning sustainable evaluations into policy learning processes. Among other structural conditions, I will argue that the constitution of networks of evaluators is a positive way to deal with these challenges and to consolidate experiences of good governance. An illustration of this possibility is shown by introducing the Latin American Evaluation Network –ReLAC- and its role in the promotion and strengthening of a better culture of evaluation in the region.