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Who Should Read This Book, and Why?

If you have responded positively to any of these questions, this book is for you.

There is a vast literature on the evaluation of research and development programs, but very little has been written on how capacity development efforts that aim to strengthen research or development efforts can be evaluated. This book begins to fill that void.

This book has been written for managers and evaluators in research and development organizations as well as in the agencies that support them—international development agencies, management development institutes, and educational institutions. It is based on the knowledge and experiences of a group of managers and evaluators from 12 national and international organizations who carried out a set of evaluation studies in Bangladesh, Cuba, Ghana, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and Viet Nam. The authors are from national and local organizations that are working to develop their own capacity, international organizations that support capacity development in the South, and donor agencies that provide resources for organizational capacity development.

The evaluations were carried out between 2000 and 2002 under the umbrella of the ECD Project, coordinated by ISNAR. The project was launched to improve understanding of how capacity development takes place and how to evaluate it. The project was an exercise in action-learning, in which participants developed their own evaluation capacity while they evaluated capacity development processes and results.

Although capacity development is demanding a great deal of attention and considerable sums are being spent in its name, few capacity development efforts have been systematically evaluated to test their underlying theories and assumptions, to document their results, or to draw lessons for improving future programs.

What we have learned from the evaluation studies confirms that we need to move away from looking at capacity development as something that is designed and implemented by donors or development agencies who offer a well-defined and standardized set of products and services to receptive ‘clients’ and ‘beneficiaries’. Capacity development cannot be delivered to ‘adopters’ or ‘users’ who play a passive role in the capacity development process. Instead, capacities develop within individuals and organizations, through learning processes and the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes. For that reason, the results of capacity development efforts are best gauged through observing changes in the behavior and performance of people and organizations, not through studies of the ‘impacts’ of external interventions.

Participation in this project enabled us to experience, understand, and appreciate how the use of evaluation can be a capacity development process in itself. Through involvement in the design, execution, and use of our evaluations, we learned more about the process of capacity development; about how to motivate managers, staff, and stakeholders to participate in shaping our organizations’ future; and how to improve partnerships for capacity development. By sharing the experiences from our evaluation studies, we invite managers and evaluators of development and research organizations to explore means to foster and improve the development of their own capacities and those of their organizations, and to make better use of evaluation to improve overall performance.

Preparation of the Book

This book represents one of the main outputs of the ECD Project. It presents insights and conclusions drawn from studies that were carried out, first and foremost, to answer questions of local interest. As the circumstances and concerns differed from

place to place, so did the questions addressed in the evaluations and the methods employed.

Preparation of the book has been a process of social construction of knowledge from beginning to end. The main ideas that are presented in the book were developed through interaction in team-based activities and workshops over nearly three years. The ECD Project group had several opportunities to discuss concepts, frameworks, and ideas around capacity development and evaluation that have since been further developed and refined.

The group was also able to exchange experiences and results from their individual evaluation studies, and drew up lists of main conclusions. The chapters of the book were drafted in a writing workshop, which gave the participants an opportunity to formulate and document collective responses to the Project’s guiding questions based on a review of all the evaluation reports and of their own personal experiences.

Organization of the Book

The book is organized into seven main chapters and an annex.

Chapter 1 provides essential background information on the project that gave rise to the book, the ECD Project. It introduces the six evaluation studies that formed the core of the ECD Project, and on whose insights this book is based.

Chapter 2 discusses basic concepts of organizational capacity, capacity development, and evaluation. It introduces a simple model for organizational assessment and identifies the various types of capacities that organizations need to learn and adapt to changes in their environment. It also explains how monitoring and evaluation can contribute to organizational capacity development.

Chapter 3 addresses two fundamental issues: why managers should be concerned with organizational capacity development and why they should evaluate capacity development efforts. The dramatic acceleration of technological, environmental, economic, and institutional change currently taking place in the world make capacity development more and more essential in research and development organizations. Some broad implications for designing capacity development efforts and for using evaluation as a tool to strengthen an organization’s capacity and improve its performance are discussed.

Chapter 4 discusses issues related to the ‘how’ of capacity development. It summarizes what the ECD Project team learned about how organizations develop capacities and how managers can facilitate and advance capacity development processes in

their organizations. We note the limitations of traditional approaches and present an alternative holistic approach to developing organizational capacities.

Chapter 5 discusses partnerships for capacity development. We deal with a number of issues—at times thorny ones—relating to the potential roles and limitations of local organizations and external agents in capacity development processes. Ways to negotiate sound partnerships for capacity development are introduced, and their implications are discussed.

Chapter 6 outlines approaches and methods for evaluating organizational capacity development. It discusses the importance of evaluation principles as well as issues related to the preparation and the carrying out of evaluations. Guidelines are presented for dealing with these issues.

Chapter 7 discusses how to utilize evaluation processes and results to advance capacity development and performance in an organization. We identify utilization as the ‘Achilles heel’ of most evaluations. Potential users and uses of evaluation are identified and some strategies for enhancing use are provided.

The ideas and information presented in these chapters are based on six evaluation studies carried out by participants in the ECD Project. Summaries of these studies are presented in the Annex.

The book has a number of special features. Each of the seven main chapters begins with an Abstract. This presents readers with advance information on what they can expect to find in the text. Quotes from interviews conducted with the ECD Project participants are presented throughout the book. They serve to highlight important points made in each chapter. In addition to examples from individual studies, a more detailed country-specific vignette is presented in each chapter. These illustrate how an organization addressed the particular issues elaborated on in each chapter. We include a brief closing section at the end of each chapter entitled Take-Home Messages, which summarizes the main points of each chapter. A Guide to Further Reading presents authoritative references and resources that enthusiastic readers may find useful in exploring further the ideas presented in this book. Following the main chapters and the summaries of the six evaluation studies on which the book is based, we include brief biosketches for each of the book’s authors, a glossary of key terms, and a complete list of bibliographic references cited in the book.

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