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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
Evaluation:
little exchange between German development cooperation organisations
The rainforest as a basis of living
Interview with Mike Jensen: Information technologies:
The real digital divide is inside the poor countries
External shocks main obstacle to sustainable debt relief
Institutions – rules in society, key to development
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[ Spring meeting of the Working Group 'Evaluation of Development Policy' ]
Evaluation: little exchange
between German development cooperation organisations
Titled 'Evaluation of Democracy Promotion', the 10th meeting of the Working Group 'Evaluation of Development Policy' in the German Society for Evaluation (DeGEval) took place in the Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv (HWWA) [Hamburg Institute of International Economics], May 22-23. The founder and Chairman of the working group, Reinhard Stockmann, devoted his keynote address to the question of possible differences between the evaluation of measures to promote democracy on the one hand, and other development projects on the other. His finding: fundamentally, no other problems arise in the evaluation of democracy promotion projects, although some of the usual evaluation problems are more marked. Thus, the influence of general conditions outside the project is stronger than in the case of other projects, the number of actors who must be considered is larger, the internal processes are more complex, and the time it takes for the measures to take effect is longer. Often, the meso-level is neglected, although precisely in the case of promoting democracy it is particularly important.
Henning Baur and Eberhard Gohl, of the Working Group 'Democracy Promotion', presented a draft guide to evaluation of projects to promote democracy and good governance, which deals above all with methodological questions – from the analysis of the project participants to the processing of the evaluation findings. Baur and Gohl emphasised that in drawing up the guide a number of questions had arisen which still must be answered. These questions – such as on the definition of democracy promotion, on the development of indicators and on data acquisition – were then discussed in working groups at the meeting. Their findings are to flow into the reworking of the guide by the next spring meeting
The second day of the meeting focused on the subject 'Learn from Evaluations'. Jörg Rech, of the University of Saarbrücken, presented the main findings of his MA thesis titled 'Communicative relations of German development cooperation organisations as the basis of horizontal learning'. Rech showed that there is certainly an infrastructure for exchange of information between the German development cooperation organisations, and thus that a basic prerequisite for cross-organisation learning is fulfilled. However, there can be no talk of a communications culture in which exchange of knowledge is a matter of course. Rech's remarks drew great interest among the participants since 'Learning from Evaluations' is one of the main Working Group's central themes, and one of its sub-working groups has dealt with it intensively for some years.
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