In preparation for the Workshop, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), at the University of Sussex, was commissioned by Japan to prepare a Synthesis Report. This provided information on agencies’ current feedback practices and an insight into the issues that Working Party Members see as being most crucial inimproving evaluation feedback.
This Workshop Report builds on this earlier document and should be read in conjunction with it. This Report seeks to highlight the main points raised during the Workshop and draw out the areas of consensus that emerged, as well as the differences in approach and outlook between agencies. These differences were one of the underlying features of the Workshop. As was pointed out in the earlier Synthesis Report, agencies are not all starting from the same place in terms of their approach to evaluation feedback, their audiences, their relative priorities, or the institutional context in which they work. So while everyone at the Workshop agreed on the urgent need to improve evaluation feedback it was clear that no one approach, or set of approaches, would suit all agencies. As one participant from China put it, this is a case where “one medicine cannot cure all patients.”
This point was reinforced by a colleague from the Philippines who commented that “we shouldn’t be looking for prescriptions … it’s outcomes that count”. Discussions at the Workshop ranged over a wide area and tackled the subject of evaluation feedback from a number of different angles. This Report is grouped under a series of broad headings that correspond to the principle areas of debate.
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