Evaluation in the Practice of Development

By M. Ravallion. 2008

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Knowledge about development effectiveness is constrained by two factors. First, the project staff in governments and international agencies who decide how much to invest in research on specific interventions are often not well informed about the returns to rigorous evaluation and (even when they are) cannot be expected to take full account of the external benefits to others from new knowledge. This leads to under-investment in evaluative research. Second, while standard methods of impact evaluation are useful, they often leave many questions about development effectiveness unanswered. The paper proposes ten steps for making evaluations more relevant to the needs of practitioners. It is argued that more attention needs to be given to identifying policy-relevant questions (including the case for intervention); that a broader approach should be taken to the problems of internal validity; and that the problems of external validity (including scaling up) merit more attention.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0deddd80e45acbe84bd69ca8d3694745b3744527

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Citations in the corpus

Microfinance and Gender Empowerment (2012, background): “See Ravallion (2008) for the latter point. experience any significant effect.20-21 Most importantly, the theory underlines the fact that gender targeting in microcredit is not equivalent to providing women with greater autonomous control over new resources.”
Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in Impact Evaluation and Measuring Results (2009, background): “Why would someone commission an impact evaluation if the results are expected to be negative (Ravallion, 2008)? An important counterbalance to this tendency for ‘promotional’ impact evaluation is created when national government partners/borrowers become strong and intelligent customers of more and ”
Beyond Good Intentions: Designing CSR Initiatives for Greater Social Impact (2020, background): “…is an enormous concern in the development literature, given the interests of national governments and international development organizations, like the World Bank, in the effectiveness of development initiatives (Banerjee & Duflo, 2009; Duflo et al., 2007; Khandker et al., 2010; Ravallion, 2008).”
New Structural Economics : A Framework for Rethinking Development (2011, unknown): “Although RCT are good tools for understanding the effectiveness of some specific microprojects, they often do not start from a clear strategic assessment of how a particular method would fit the knowledge gaps of highest priority (Ravallion 2009).”
New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development (2010, unknown): “Although RCT are good tools for understanding the effectiveness of some specific microprojects, they often do not start from a clear strategic assessment of how a particular method would fit the knowledge gaps of highest priority (Ravallion 2009).”