Session 1. The craft of result-sbase management

	PADM 5345 - Evaluation of International Programs and Projects
navigation bar	1. The Craft of Results-based Management

January 24, 2018

First governments, and now international organizations, are under pressure to implement results-based management (RBM). This is based on the notion that a program should be judged not by whether it produced outputs or services, or spent the money it was given, but rather by whether these led to changes in the beneficiary population that were likely to solve the problems for which the programs were created. RBM consists of three phases: strategic planning in which promises are made about the results that the program promises to make happen, program implementation in which the program produces outputs and services, and evaluation in which the program shows whether or not it made results happen and why or why not. The course will focus on the first and third phases, with an emphasis on evaluation. My other course, PADM 5450, International Public and NGO Management focused on strategic planning.

Empirical evaluation of public programs is well over 75 years old. Starting in the 1920's with some of the earliest studies of industrial sociology, through the great empirical analyses during World War II, to the present, the concept that programs should be subject to proof that they are achieving results is central of public administration thinking.

Evaluation of international programs has been a concern since the beginning of the United Nations, for many of the same reasons that it has become part of national administrative practices. Some would argue that it is even more important for international programs since, in the main, they are funded by national governments who need to be able to demonstrate the worth of deploying scarce public resources to international organizations rather than using them nationally. This is one reason why results-based management has been imposed on international organizations by their Member States.

While evaluation of international programs shares many of the concepts that would be used at national and sub-national levels, it also faces more difficulties because, generally, international programs act indirectly. The lecture explores this issue in the context of RBM.

Questions covered	What is RBM? What is evaluation and what is monitoring? What are the main elements of evaluation? How is evaluation in the public sector different from evaluation in the private sector? How is evaluation different at the international level than at the national?
Lecture	Lecture: The Craft of Evaluation PowerPoint Presentation from 25 January 2018
Required readings	RealWorld Evaluation, Chapter 1 United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services, Review of results-based management (RBM) at the United Nations Secretariat: RBM has been an administrative chore of little value to accountability and decision-making, (A/63/268, 22 Sept 2008) International Labour Office, Independent External Evaluation of the ILO Evaluation Function, July 2010. International Atomic Energy Agency, How Well Are We Doing? A Guide to Programme and Project Evaluation for Agency Managers, IAEA Evaluation Series, Vol. 1, December 2002, Excerpts from the Forward and Introduction (used with permission). United Nations Evaluation Group, Norms for Evaluation in the UN System, April 2005
Recommended readings	United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Systematic Monitoring and Evaluation of Integrated Development Programmes, (United Nations publication, sales number E.78.IV.11, Chapter 1. This publication was produced by a team consisting of Inge Kaul, who was later Director of UNDP's Office of Development Studies; Clinton Rapley, who retired from the United Nations in March 2003 and John Mathiason. It shows basically what U.N. evaluation orthodoxy sounded like 36 years ago. United Nations Development Programme, Handbook on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating for Development Results, (2009) If you want to go more into the general orthodoxy of evaluation, these are two books that were used in courses on program evaluation at both the Maxwell School at Syracuse and the Wagner School of NYU. Interestingly, their first editions date to the 1970's, which suggests that plus ça le change, plus c'est le même chose. Peter Rossi, Howard Freeman, and Mark Lipsey (2003) Evaluation: A Systematic Approach, 7th ed. Sage Publications. Weiss, Carol. Evaluation: Methods for Studying Programs and Policies, 2nd Edition (1998), 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Simulation	The course will include a simulation in which we design and conduct an evaluation of an organization to be selected. You will be a member of a team evaluating one project. Each week you will have an assignment that is part of the evaluation process. It will be sent by e-mail and posted on the syllabus page and the respective session page.
Session recording	January 25, 2018: Recording is in the course Blackboard

PADM 5345 - Evaluation of International Programs and Projects

1. The Craft of Results-based Management

Questions covered

Lecture

Required readings

Recommended readings