Evaluation methods looking for projects or projects seeking appropriate evaluation methods?

A few months ago I carried out a brief desk review of 3ie's approach to funding impact evaluations, for AusAID's Office of Development Effectiveness. One question that I did not address was "Broadly, are there other organisations providing complementary approaches to 3ie for promoting quality evaluation to fill the evidence gap in international development?"

While my report for 3ie examined the pros and cons of 3ie's use of experimental methods as a preferred evaluation design, it did not look at the question of appropriate institutional structures for supporting better evaluations. Yet, you could argue that choices made about institutional structures could have more consequences than those involving the specifics of particular evaluation methods. The question quoted above seems to contain a tacit assumption about institutional arrangements, i.e that improvements in evaluation can best be promoted by funding externally located specialists centres of expertise, like 3ie. This kind of assumption seems questionable, for two sets of reasons that I explain below. One is to do with the results they generate, the other concerns the neglected potential of an alternative.

In the "3ie" (Open Window) model anyone can submit a proposal for an evaluation of a project implemented by any organisation. This approach is conducive to 'cherry picking' of evaluable (by experimental methods) projects and the collection of evaluations representing a miscellany of types of projects - about which it will be hard to generate useful generalisations. Plus an unknown number of other projects possibly being left unevaluated, because they dont fit the prevailing method preferences.

In the alternative scenario the funding of evaluations would not be outsourced to any specialist centre(s). Instead, an agency like DFID would identify a portfolio of projects needing evaluation. For example, those initiatives focusing on climate change adaptation. DFID would call for proposals for their evaluation and then screen those proposals, largely as it does now, but perhaps seeking a wider range of bidders.

Unlike the present process, it would then offer funding to the bidders who had provided, say the best 50% of, the proposals to develop those proposals further in more detail. At present there is no financial incentive to do so, and any time and money already spent on developing proposals is unlikely to be recompensed, because only one bidder will get the contract.

The expected result of this "proposal development" funding would be revised and expanded proposals that outlined the bidder's proposed methodology in considerable detail, in something like an  inception report. All the bidders involved at this stage would need access to a given set of project documents and at least one collective meeting with the project holders.

The revised proposals would then be assessed by DFID, but with a much greater weighting towards the technical content of the proposal than exists at present. These second level assessment would benefit from the involvement of external specialists, as in the 3ie model. DFID Evaluation Department already does this in the case of some evaluations through the use of a quality assurance panel.The best proposal would then be funded as normal, and the evaluation then carried out.

Both the winning and losing technical proposals would then be put in the public domain via the DFID website in order to encourage cross fertilisation of ideas, external critiquing and public accountability. This is not the case at present. All bidders operate in isolation. There are no opportunities to learn from each other. The same appears to be the case with 3ie, the full text of technical proposals are not publicly available (even of those who were successful). Making the proposals public would mean that the proposal development funding had not been wasted, even where the proposals were not successful.

In summary, with the "external centre of expertise" model there is a risk that methodological preferences are the driving force behind what gets evaluated.  The alternative is a portfolio-of-projects led approach, where interim funding support is used to generate a diversity of improved evaluation proposals, which are later made accessible by all and which can then inform future proposals.

A meta-evaluation might be useful to test the efficacy of this project-led approach. Other matched kinds of projects also needing evaluation could continue to be funded by the pre-existing mechanisms (e.g. in-country DFID offices). Pair comparisons could later be made of the quality of the evaluations that were subsequently produced by the two different mechanisms.Although it is likely there would be multiple points of difference, it should be possible for DFID, and any other stakeholders, to prioritise their relative importance, and come to an overall judgement of which has been most useful.

PS: 3ie seems to be heading in this direction, to some extent.  3ie now have a Policy Window where they have recently sought applications for the evaluation of projects belonging to a specific portfolio ("Poverty Reduction Interventions in Fiji" implemented by the Government of Fiji). Funding is available to cover costs of the successful  bidder (only) to visit Fiji "to develop a scope of work to be included in a subsequent Request for Proposal (RFP) to conduct the impact evaluation".Subject to 3ie's approval of the developed proposal 3ie will then fund the implementation of the evaluation by the bidder.The success of this approach will be worth watching, especially its ability to ensure the evaluation of the whole portfolio of projects (which is likely to depend on 3ie having some flexiblity about the methodologies used). However, I am perhaps making a risky assumption here, that the  projects within the portfolio to be evaluated have not already been pre-selected on the grounds of their suitability to 3ie's preferred approach.



PS: I have been reading the [Malawi] CIVIL SOCIETY GOVERNANCE FUND -
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION REFERENCE DOCUMENT FOR POTENTIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS. In the section on the role of the Independent Evaluation Agent, it is stated that the agent will be responsible for "The commissioning and coordination of randomised control trials for two large projects funded during the first or second year of granting." This specification appears to have been made prior to the funding of any projects. So, will the fund managers feel obliged to find and fund two large projects that will be evaluable by RCTs? Fascinating, in a bizarre kind of way.

Models and reality: Dialogue through simulation

I have been finalising preparations for a training workshop on network visualisation as an evaluation tool. In the process I came across this "Causality Map for the Enhanced Evaluation Framework", for Budget Support activities.

On the surface this diagram seems realistic, budget support is a complex process. However,  I will probably use this diagram to highlight what is often missing in models of development interventions. Like many others, it lacks any feedback loops, and as such it is a model that is a long way from the reality it is trying to represent in summary form. Using a distinction being used more widely these days (and despite my reservations about it), I think this model qualifies as complicated but not complex. If you were to assign a numerical value to each node and to each connecting relationship, the value that would be generated at the end of the process (on the right) would always be the same.

The picture changes radically as soon as you include feedback loops, which is much easier to do when you use network rather than chain models (and where you give up using one dimension in the above type of diagram to represent the passage of time). Here below is my very simple example. This model represents five actors. They all start with a self-esteem rating of 1, but their subsequent self-esteem depends on the influence of the others they are connected to (represented by positive or negative link values, [randomly allocated]) and the self-esteem of those others.

You can see what happens when self-esteem values are recalculated to take into account those each actor is connected to, in this Excel file (best viewed with the NodeXL plugin). After ten iterations, Actor 0 has the highest self-esteem, and Actor 2 has the lowest. After 20 iterations Actor 2 has the highest self-esteem and Actor 1 has the lowest. After 30 iterations Actor 1 has the highest self-esteem and Actor O has the lowest. With more and more iterations the self-esteem of the actors involved might stabilise at a particular set of values, or it might repeat past patterns already seen, or maybe not.

There are two important points to be made here. The first is the dramatic affect of introducing feedback loops, in even the simplest of models. The aggregate results are not easily predictable, but they can be simulated. The second is that nature of the impact that is seen even in this very small complex system is a matter of the time period under examination. Impact seen at iteration 10 is different from iteration 20 and different again at iteration 30. In the words of the proponents of systems perspectives on evaluation, what is seen depends on the "perspective" that is chosen (Williams and Hummelbrunner, 2009).

PS 1: Michael Woolcock has written about the need to pay more attention to a related issue, captured by the term "impact trajectory". He argues that: "...in virtually all sectors, the development community has a weak (or at best implicit or assumed) understanding of the shape of the impact trajectories associated with its projects, and even less understanding of how these trajectories vary for different kinds of project operating in different contexts, at different scales and with varying degrees of implementation effectiveness; more forcefully, I argue that the weakness of this knowledge greatly compromises our capacity to make accurate statements about project impacts, irrespective of whether they are inspired by ‘demand’ or ‘supply’ side imperatives, and even if they have been subject to the most deftly implemented randomised trial"

PS1.1: Some examples:I recall that it has been argued that there is a big impact on households when they first join savings and credit groups, but the continuing impact drops down to a much more modest level thereafter. On the other hand, the impact of girls completing primary school may be the greatest when it reaches through to the next generation, to the number of their children and their survival rates. 

There is one downside to my actors' self-esteem model, which is its almost excessive sensitivity. Small changes to any of the node or link values can  significantly change the longer term impacts. This is because this simple model of a social system has no buffers or "slack". Buffers could be in the form of accumulated attributes of the actors (like an individual's self-confidence arising from their lifetime experience or a firm's accumulated inventory) and also provided via the wider context (like individuals having access to a wider network of friends or firms having alternate sources of suppliers) . This model could clearly be improved upon.

PS 2: I came across this quote by Duncan Watts, in a commentary on his latest book "Everything is obvious" - "when people base their decisions in part on what other people are deciding, collective outcomes become highly unpredictable" That is exactly what is happening in the self-esteem model above.Duncan Watts has written extensively on networks.

Here below is another unidirectional causal model, available on the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development website

What I like about this example is that visitors to the website can click on the links (but not in the copy I have made above) and be taken to other pages where they will be given a detailed account of the nature of the causal processes represented by those links. This is exactly what the web was designed for. Visitors can also click on any of the boxes at the bottom and find out more about the activities that input into the whole process.

The inclusion of a feedback loop in this diagram would not be too difficult to imagine. For example, from perhaps the top box back to one of the earlier boxes e.g New firms start / register. This positive feedback loop would quickly produce escalating results further up the diagram. Ideally, we would recognise that this type of outcome (simple continuous escalation) does not fit very well with our perception of what happens in reality. That awareness would then lead to further improvements to the model, which generated more realistic behaviors.

PS 24 May 2011:  In their feminist perspective on monitoring and evaluation Batliwala and Pittman have suggested that we need "to develop a “theory of constraints” to accompany our “theory of change” in any given context..." They noted that "… most tools do not allow for tracking negative change, reversals, backlash, unexpected change, and other processes that push back or shift the direction of a positive change trajectory. How do we create tools that can capture this “two steps forward, one step back” phenomenon that many activists and organizations acknowledge as a reality and in which large amounts of learning lay hidden? In women’s rights work, this is vital because as soon as advances seriously challenge patriarchal or other social power structures, there are often significant reactions and setbacks. These are not, ironically, always indicative of failure or lack of effectiveness, but exactly the opposite— this is evidence that the process was working and was creating resistance from the status quo as a result .”

But it is early days. Many development programs do not yet even have a decent unidirectional causal model of what they are trying to do. In this context, the inclusion of any sort of feedback loop would be a major improvement. As shown above, the next step that can be taken is to run simulations of those improved models by inserting numerical values in the links and functions/equations in nodes of those models. In the examples above we can see how simulations can help improve models by showing how their results do not fit with our own observations of reality. Perhaps in the future they will be seen as a useful form of pre-test, worth carrying out at the earliest stages of an evaluation.

PS 3: This blog was prompted by comments to me by Elliot Stern on the relevance of modeling and simulation to evaluation, on which I hope he has more to say.

PS 4 I am struggling through Manuel DeLanda's Philosophy and Simulation: The emergence of synthetic reason (2011), which being about simulations, relates to the contents of this post.

PS 5: I have just scanned Funnell and Roger's very useful new book, Purposeful Program Theory" and found 67 unidirectional models but only 15 models that have one or more feedback loops (that is, 23%). This is quite dissapointing. So is the advice on the use of feedback loops: "We advise against using so many feedback loops that the logic becomes meaningless. When feedback loops are incorporated, a balance needs to be struck between including all of them and (because everything is related to everything else) and capturing some important ones. Showing that everything leads to everything else can make an outcome chain very difficult to understand - what we call a spagetti junction model. Neverthless some feedback loops can be critical to the success of a program and should be included ..."p187

Given the scarcity of models with feedback links even in this book, the risk of having too many feedback loops sounds like "a  problem we would like to have" And I am not sure why an excess of feedback links should be any more of a probability than an excess of forward links. The concern about the understandability of models with feedback loops is however more reasonable,  for reasons I have outlined above. When you introduce feedback loops what were either simple and complicated models start to exhibit complex behavior. Welcome to something that is a bit closer to the real world.

PS6:  "As change makers, we should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops", the text of the last slide in Owen Barder's presentation "Development Complexity and Evolution"

PS7: In Funnell and Roger's book (page 486) they describe how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) " recognised that controlled experimentation with the climate system in which the hypothesised agents of change are systematically varied in order to determine the climate's sensitivity to these agents...[is] clearly not possible"  Different models of climate change were developed with different assumptions about possible contributing factors. "The observed patterns of warming, including greater warming over land than over the ocean, and their changes over time, are simulated only by the models that include anthropogenic forcing. No coupled global climate change model that has used natural forcing only has reproduced the continental warming trends in individual continents (except Antarctica) over the second half of the 20th centrury" (IPCC, 2001, p39)

A submission to the UK Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI)

Background:

"ICAI is holding a public consultation to understand which areas of UK overseas aid stakeholder groups and the public believe the Commission should report on in its first three years. The consultation will run for 12 weeks from the 14th January until the 7th April 2011.
Click here to respond to the consultation
If you would like to read further information on ICAI, the consultation and the aid budget, please click on ‘Consultation document’.
If you would like to consider the questions in detail before responding, please click on ‘Downloadable questions’. You will need to access the online response form to respond".

Two initial comments:

1. An online survey is a fairly narrow approach to a public consultation. There are many other options, even if the ICAI is limited to those that can take place online, rather than face to face

2. The focus of the consultation is also narrow, i.e. "which areas of UK overseas aid stakeholder groups and the public believe the Commission should report on in its first three years". Equally important is how those areas of aid should be reported on.

On widening the process of consultation

1. All pages on the ICAI website should have associated Comment facilities, which visitors can make use of. More and more websites are being constructed with blog-type features such as these, because website managers these days expect to be interacting with their audience, not simply broadcasting. Built into such a facilitwould be an assumption that there will be an ongoing process of consultation, not a once off event.

2. The raw data results of the current online survey should be made publicly available, not just summaries. This is already possible, with minimal extra work required, because the survey provider (SurveyMonkey.com) is able to provide a public link to the survey results, with multiple options regarding reading, filtering and downloading the data. The more people who can access the data, the more value that might be obtained from it.  However, the most important reason for doing so is that the ICAI should be seen to be maximally transparent in its operations. Transparency will help build trust and confidence in the work and judgements of the commission.

3. Although late in the day, the ICAI should edit the Consultation page to include an invitation to people to submit their own submissions using their own words and structures.

4. The ICAI website should include an option for visitors to sign up for email notification of any changes to the website, including the main content pages and any comments made on those pages by visitors.

5. The ICAI should be open about what it will be open about. It should develop a policy on transparency and place that policy on its website. Disclosure policies are now commonplace for many large international organisations like the World Bank and IMF, and transparency in regard to international aid is high on the agenda of many governments, including the UK. Having such a policy does mean everything about the workings of the ICAI must be made public, but it would typically require a default assumption of openness along with specified procedures and conditions relating to when and where information will not be disclosed.

On widening the content of consultation

 1. The ICAI should be aware, if not already, that there continues to be intense debate about the best ways of assessing the value of international aid. This debate exists because of the  multiplicity of purposes behind aid programs, many and varied types of aid, the enormous diversity of contexts where it is provided, the wide range of people and organisations involved in its delivery, as well as some genuinely difficult issues of measurement and analysis. There are no simple and universally applicable solutions. Value for Money provides only a partial view of aid impact, and is only partially measurable. Randomise Control Trials (RCTs) can be useful for simple replicable interventions in comparable conditions, but many aid interventions are complex. The best immediate response in these circumstances is for the ICAI to be maximally transparent about the methods being used to assess aid interventions, and to be open to the wider debate.

A good starting point would be for the ICAI to make public: (a) the Terms of Reference for the "Contracted Out Service Provider" who will do the assessment work for the ICAI, and (b) the tendered proposal put forward by the winning bidder. Both of these documents refer to ways and means of doing the required work. It is also expected that there will be periodic reviews of the work of the winning bidder. The ToRs and reports of those reviews should also be publicly disclosed on the ICAI website. Finally, all the  "evaluations, reviews and investigations" to be carried out by the winning bidder on behalf of the ICAI should be publicly disclosed, as hopefully has already been agreed.

2. It would be useful, if only to help ensure that the ICAI itself delivers Value for Money", if the ICAI could clarify not only how its role will differ from that of the DFID Evaluation Department and multi-agency initiatives like 3IE, but also how it will cooperate with them to exploit any complementarities and possible synergies in their work.Complete and utter independence could lead to wasteful duplication. In the worst case various wheels could be reinvented. 

For example, the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has over the years developed a widely agree set of evaluation criteria, however these are nowhere to be seen in the ICAI's ToR for the "Contracted Out Service Provider". Instead, Value For Money receives repeated attention, and its definition is sourced to the National Audit Office (NAO). However, the NAO is a member of the Improvement Network, which has provided a wider perspective on Value for Money. Their website notes that effectiveness is part of Value for Money, as well as efficiency and economy. Commenting on effectiveness they note:

"Effectiveness is a measure of the impact that has been achieved, which can be either quantitative or qualitative....Outcomes should be equitable across communities, so effectiveness measures should include aspects of equity, as well as quality. Sustainability is also an increasingly important aspect of effectiveness."

Sustainability is a DAC evaluation criteria which has been around for a decade or more.

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A link to this blog posting has been emailed to c-robathan@icai.independent.gov.uk.

Other readers of this blog might like to do the same, with their own views.

PS: See Alex Jacob's March 22nd submission to the ICAI: Advice for the new aid watchdog