The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) together with the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development hosted a workshop on current trends in Impact Evaluation. The event started with a Public Lecture of Howard White, Director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3IE), one of the leading experts of impact evaluation in the field of Development Cooperation. Howard White informed about the recent trends in impact evaluation and about the function of the organization he is currently heading. After an informal lunch, the workshop contained three presentations. First, Dr. Hilmar Schneider from the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) provided evidence from an impact evaluation in the German labour market, which demonstrated the similarities between impact evaluation in OECD and developing countries. Hereafter, Howard White provided the major findings of a synthesis report done by 3IE on results from impact evaluation in the water sector. Finally, Dr. Isabel Günther of ETH Zürich gave an overview of a current evaluation project in the rural water sector, Benin. The workshop closed with an informal exchange among the participants.

Pushing Forward the Results Agenda: After a first workshop on rigorous evaluation methods in autumn 2008, the German Development Institute and the Federal Ministry for Cooperation and Development once again organized a one-day conference on impact evaluation. The timeliness of the topic, the success of the first workshop and a program with internationally recognized speakers proved to be the right mixture for attracting a large audience. More than 70 experts from universities, think tanks, ministries, technical & financial cooperation agencies and NGOs engaged in discussions about methods, systemic learning processes and the varying roles of different actors in the field of impact evaluation. Even if it is difficult to summarize the event’s diverse contributions, concurring views/themes emerged from the presentations and discussions (which seem to be of special relevance in the current debate on impact evaluation). First of all, the event demonstrated the growing awareness about the necessity to use rigorous methods in impact evaluation. Today, most actors in the evaluation scene agree that there is an important place for rigorous statistical analysis in order to identify the effect(s) of interventions. Beyond, there is an emerging consensus that mixed methods – the combination of quantitative statistical and context sensitive qualitative analysis – should be the state of the art. Only then are impact evaluations able to carve out whether and why projects and programs work. Yet, the challenge for many evaluation practitioners still consists in the early identification of projects suitable for applying ambitious mixed methods as well as in the concrete design and funding of ambitious evaluations. Second, with the rise of analytically more ambitious evaluation methods, it became evident that evaluation practitioners are not only facing the challenge of effectively feeding their knowledge into the sphere of project managers respectively political decision-makers. Moreover, they also have to strengthen incentives for academic researchers to interpret their participation in evaluation not only as a useful tool in advancing their academic careers but also to more strongly engage in the qualitative interpretation of their results. Third, as the number of high-quality impact evaluation rises continuously, there is a growing need for aggregating these isolated sources of knowledge into a broader, systemic learning process. In this regard, it is important that researchers and practitioners put more emphasis on high-quality systematic and synthetic reviews. Finally, a presentation on evaluations of Germany’s labor market reforms demonstrated the close links between impact evaluation in development cooperation and domestic policy fields. Often, the content of the evaluation is strikingly similar because in development cooperation the promotion of large policy reforms has become at least as important as managing concrete projects. Perhaps even more striking is the fact that the evaluation of domestic policies seems to be confronted with very similar structural challenges: designing high-quality evaluation schemes even before policy implementation, sensibilizing policy- and decision-makers for the potentials of evaluation and feeding evaluation knowledge into ongoing policy-processes.