Since its birth in 1944, the World Bank has had a strong focus on development projects. Yet, it did not have a project evaluation unit until the early 1970s. An early attempt to conceptualize project appraisal had been made in the 1960s by Albert Hirschman, whose undertaking raised high...

Based on previously untapped archival material, this chapter discusses the establishment of the operations evaluation function at the World Bank between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, and the conflicting visions that shaped it. The birth of the operations evaluation function at the Bank was...