Costs and Benefits of Evaluation in Development Cooperation : A Thought on ‘Evaluation Deadweight’

While there is little doubt about the importance of evaluation in development cooperation, the proliferation of systematic evaluation has raised concerns over the so-called “evaluation deadweight” which may exist where costs of evaluation exceed the benefits. We need to understand what values we have created by the evaluation at what costs, whether the benefits meet our expectations, and if we are achieving value for money in development evaluation. Based on these assessments, we may finally draw lessons and learn how we can improve evaluation practice as we do when conducting evaluations of development programs. To ensure the costs are better spent to create larger benefits, it would be necessary to pay more attention to the problems we want to solve by evaluation and allocate more resources in well-targeted evaluations rather than repetitive project evaluations