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'Evidence-based' development policy has caused impact evaluations to prioritise accountability over addressing processual learning questions. Moreover, evaluation scholarship is dominated by surveys, whereas qualitative research remains scant. This article traces one particular evaluation, within the independent Evaluation Department of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It asks, 'How do evaluators and policymakers interact and what adjustments follow from the illustrative evaluation?' It used participant observations, documents and interviews with policymakers and evaluators. An in-depth thematic analysis resulted in a typology of evaluator roles: (1) knowledge broker, (2) facilitator, (3) archive, (4) truth-revealing and (5) critical voice. Finally, policymakers and managers adjusted in three ways: symbolic, instrumental and empowerment. These results imply that if evaluators deliberate a suitable role, they (1) increase their partial understandings of the programme under scrutiny and the involved stakeholders, and (2) enhance the potential of synergies in collective learning to emerge in an evaluation team and the broader institution.

"This volume examines the persistence of poverty - both rural and urban - in developing countries, and the response of local governments to the problem, exploring the roles of governments, NGOs, and CSOs in national and sub-national agenda-setting, policy-making, and poverty-reduction strategies. It brings together a rich variety of in-depth country and international studies, based on a combination of original data-collection and extensive research experience in developing countries. Taking a bottom-up and multi-dimensional perspective of poverty and well-being as the starting point, the authors develop a convincing set of arguments for putting the priorities of poor people first on any development agenda, thus carving out an undisputable role for local governance in interplay with higher-up governance actors and institutions."--Publisher's website.

In recent years, the international community has increasingly directed its attention to reducing the prevalence of child marriage, which is defined as marriage before the age of 18. Child marriage has been shown to disproportionately affect young women in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and to have a range of adverse health impacts, particularly for women. This special issue demonstrates empirically the complexity of drivers of child marriage, contributing to emic understandings of the circumstances in which families and young women consider an early marriage the most secure pathway. The special issue calls for moving beyond girls and families as sites of intervention, and beyond programmatic emphases on individual choice and 'tradition.' In this introductory article, we draw attention to the consequences of the exclusive focus on negative consequences of child marriage, arguing that this (a) obscures the complexity of the structural issues driving child marriage, (b) hinders developing understanding of (perceived) positive outcomes of a marriage before the age of 18, such as (short-term) physical and economic security, and (c) forms an impediment to efforts to identify alternatives to child marriage which can produce similarly positive—and more long-term—results. Rather than departing from the premise that certain choices are better than others, we call for research and interventions that seek to understand and respond to the broader context in which choices are made.