Success Stories
Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP) - Colombia
Fundación Internacional y para Iberoamérica de Administración y Políticas Públicas (FIIAPP) - España
Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas - Perú
Ministerio de Hacienda - Paraguay
Ministerio de Planificación (MIDEPLAN) - Costa Rica
Oficina de Planeamiento y Presupuesto (OPP) - Uruguay
Secretaría Técnica Planifica Ecuador - Ecuador
Strategic use of evaluation recommendations
Summary of the case:
The recommendations made in the evaluations of the EVALÚA project have enabled strategic improvements to be brought about in public policies and programmes in the partner countries.
Until recently, evaluation was seen as the final phase of a policy, but no attention was paid to what it can offer in terms of scalability: if a policy is quickly found to be of good quality and is successfully evaluated during its lifetime, the recommendations can be transformed into strategic improvements that can be implemented on a larger scale. In this way, evaluation reports and recommendations become a planning tool and not an end in themselves.
A good example of this could be the use made in Costa Rica of the evaluation of the Gender Equality and Equity Plan (Plan de Igualdad y Equidad de Género - PIEG), whose recommendations were applied in the programming of the new Plan. Given that elections were held on the dates the evaluation concluded, it was assumed that the development of the new Plan would be carried out by a new government team. Hence, it was important to elaborate a product that would be valid for any new administration, thus requiring the integration of the maximum number of national institutions and actors during the evaluation process.
Main learning and recommendations:
The importance of considering evaluations within the framework of the whole cycle of public policies, and not as their final phase.
Achieved impacts and objectives:
- A strong contribution to SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) has been made by fostering "effective and targeted capacity-building in developing countries to support national plans to implement all the sustainable development goals" (target 17.9)
- One of the achieved impacts was to develop new programming based on evidence from the evaluations that were carried out. More continuity in policies was also achieved, despite changes of government.
Key success factors:
The factors that were key are related to:
- The quality of the evaluation reports.
- The validation of the reports by various counterpart institutions at the regional level.
- The opportunity to present results when evidence is needed for decision making.
- The involvement of various national actors throughout the evaluation process.
The added value of Triangular Cooperation: (more information here)
1. Building ownership and trust.
2. Promoting complementarity and increasing coordination in development cooperation.
3. Sharing knowledge and learning jointly.
4. Co-creating solutions and flexibility.
5. Enhancing the volume, scope and sustainability of Triangular Cooperation
6. Achieving global and regional development goals through strengthened partnerships for sustainable development.
Useful links to deepen or support this knowledge:
https://www.adelante-i.eu/evalua-presenta-en-costa-rica-los-resultados-de-la-evaluacion-de-la-politica-nacional-de-igualdad-deRELATED FILES
When formulating the project, the team ensured that it would have the political commitment of the ministries and sectoral institutions in each of the countries involved. However, this exercise was not repeated with the same intensity at the beginning of the project and after the successive changes of government in the Mesoamerican countries, which led to losing the pulse of the political environment and institutions. When the team became aware of this weakness, time and resources were devoted to making the necessary corrective decisions.
The project defined as a baseline scenario for the achievement of the originally expected results that there would be no massive changes in terms of institutional references or priorities. However, throughout the project's implementation, there have been changes of government in the region (and to a large extent of the officials and technical staff involved in the institutions involved) and along with them, changes in the level of interest and commitment to the subject and consequently to the project's proposals and initiatives. However, the project was able to adapt to changes in governments and countries that had participated in the formulation phase.
