Suchergebnisse

The Paris Declaration, endorsed in 2005, commits international development aid donors and recipients to act in accordance with five principles: ownership, alignment, harmonization, results, and mutual accountability. This landmark international agreement was the culmination of several decades of attempts to improve the quality of aid and its impact on development. As context for the evaluation of the Paris Declaration, this article traces the history of international agreements that led up to the Paris Declaration and the significance of the agreement itself. The number of countries and international organizations endorsing the Declaration was unprecedented, reflecting a greater diversity of voices included in international deliberations on aid effectiveness. It provided a practical, action-oriented roadmap with specific targets to be met. The evaluation derives its significance and relevance from the importance of the Paris Declaration and from the innovative, rigorous evaluation approach taken as an exemplar of joint evaluations.

Reflecting the long experience of the main organizers of the Paris Declaration evaluation, dissemination and use of the national and synthesis evaluation results were conceived, born, and carried out with a consistent view to the usefulness of both its processes and products for policy. This shaped all aspects of the Evaluation: governance, stakeholder participation, setting the evaluation questions, design and implementation of the processes and methods, and injecting findings and recommendations into the policy bloodstream. The focus on utility imposed the challenges of combining rigorous evaluation with a high degree of transparency and accessibility for the intended users and audiences, while building a network of stakeholders sufficiently committed, engaged, and comfortable with the results to be able to champion them through the tools and channels available to them, individually and collectively. However, the early record of influence illustrates the limits of evaluation in the face of rapidly changing political agendas.

Over the last decade humanitarian interventions have increased significantly. Parallel to this increase in humanitarian assistance has been the growth of evaluation of humanitarian action. This article describes the results of a global evaluation of emergency assistance from 1992 to 1999. It was undertaken by DANIDA utilizing the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) methodology for humanitarian evaluation. The evaluation reports that lie behind this summary article are based on case studies in Afghanistan, Angola, the Caucasus, the Great Lakes, Sudan and the Former Yugoslavia. In addition detailed analysis was provided of the international response system, focusing on the United Nations family of humanitarian actors and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as leading international non-governmental organizations. These reports were summarized in an overall synthesis report, which is used to draw out the conclusions contained in this article. The conclusions note the significant level of change that has occurred, especially the debate about the disaster continuum and the emerging problem of internally displaced people. The article also notes the impact of the overall evaluation exercise on the reformulation of Danish humanitarian assistance.