Actor Atlas

• The two principals, citizens of the target groups and taxpayer of the donor country, have a weak position in the delivery chain of development policy.
• Finding of evaluations have very few implications for the careers of development cooperation actors.
• Finding of evaluations rarely contain the views of those really affected, the citizens of the target groups.
• The Children That Fortune Forgot¹ (New York Times, December 12, 2010) (How well are certain children's rights met in the different OECD countries?).

• Development cooperation agencies continue to have a preference for evaluation practices that elude comparison and are often anything but truly independent

• The “ancien régime” of Development Cooperation, which Easterly once described as a “cartel of good intentions,” was characterized by costly bureaucratic procedures prescribed by a constantly growing number of donor organizations, a self-referential planning logic (consider the case of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP)), together with the proliferation of ill-coordinated projects and programs and evaluation systems biased toward the interests of donor agencies’ headquarters, led to an inadequate involvement of the recipient countries.
• The pressure on the organizations evaluated to succeed has tended to induce evaluators to emphasize strengths rather than weaknesses, and thus to come up with relatively positive results.
• The fragmentation of a large number of competing DC agencies led these agencies to develop internal evaluation methods and to cultivate the use of special jargons of their own that constituted a major barrier to the comparability of evaluations and the transfer of knowledge between the actors involved.
• The existence of factual dependencies among evaluation and other units in implementing agencies, in particular as far as staff career opportunities are concerned, make it difficult to speak of truly independent units.
• Freelance evaluators and experts, are faced with an enormous conflict of interest.

Source: Jörg Faust and Dirk Messner (2007) Organizational Challenges for an Effective Aid Architecture – Traditional Deficits, the Paris Agenda and Beyond (2007)

• The Paris process neglects, and in part even exacerbates, a core problem of DC: the continuing large number of DC actors engaged in most recipient countries without a strong demand-driven orientation. This unresolved problem has driven – in principle reasonable – coordination and harmonization processes toward costly bureaucratic patterns of donor-driven planning procedures that hold little promise of sustainable success (Faust & Messner, 2007)
• The Children That Fortune Forgot² (New York Times, December 12, 2010) (Evaluate country-ranking in the context of Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 3.1).

C-pico

C-micro

• In countries with relatively high levels of administrative capacities and transparent and participatory institutions: Introduce a competition-oriented procedure to strengthen partner-country “ownership” and stimulate customer-oriented competition between suppliers of development services: instead of offering partner countries certain technical services and specifically project-tied financial aid, recipient countries could be provided with “vouchers” they could use to purchase development services in an international market made up of donor agencies (Faust & Messner, 2007).
• In countries with weak administrative capacities and participatory institutions: use long-term-oriented capacity-building strategies and cope with the problem of donor fragmentation (Faust & Messner, 2007).
• Create a global market for development services with comparable standards in tenders and evaluation, a high level of transparency, and truly independent evaluation.

• Strengthen (strategic) coordination & monitoring, and achieve demand-driven competition (for operational project activities) (Faust & Messner, 2007).
• Truly independent, transparent, and comparable evaluation methods will enable the management capacities of recipient governments for instance as regards knowledge concerning both effective and less successful DC interventions (Faust & Messner, 2007).
• Achieve a reduction in the number of development cooperation actors involved in the strategic coordination and shaping of country portfolios.
• Regulate actors in the operational field through the market mechanism.
• Differentiation by country.