Monitoring and Cost-Effectiveness in Development Management

Abstract

I would like to argue that the tasks undertaken by the large multilateral and bilateral donor agencies require a particularly high analytic standard, but several incentives that influence development practice—political incentives for donor and recipient governments, organizational incentives for development agencies, and personal incentives for managers—have led to positive bias and analytic compromise.

The central challenge in the management of development assistance is to maintain this kind of consciousness—this analytic perspective—among the corps of professional staff. Some might like to think that development can be achieved by getting governments to liberalize markets or by getting local participation in project management, and these may well be important tactics. Intuition suggests and experience teaches, however, that there can be no formula for successful development. Each investment presents a unique design and management challenge. There are two problems in maintaining the will and the capacity toaddress this challenge: an incentive problem and one we can call intellectual or cognitive. The key to solving both problems, or so I will argue, is strong evaluation.