Introduction

Rosalind Eyben and Irene Guijt

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concerns that have guided the Big Push Forward and its culminating conference about the politics of evidence from which originated the case studies in the present book. The book's principal themes that emerge from the case studies are identified and the chapter concludes with a summary outline of the contributing chapters.

Keywords: Big Push Forward, results and evidence, power practices, accountability, transformational development

In June 2014, the board of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) adopted a new funding model 'to have a positive leveraging effect on the development of national sector-wide policies, strategies and systems' (GPE, 2014: 4). Thirty per cent of the funds were to be used for ex-post payments against predetermined results. The United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States had pushed for a greater percentage of the allocation to be through payment by results (PBR), but the majority of the board members were reluctant to risk a higher proportion of funding to a bold experiment they did not fully understand – and of which the pilot phase was cancelled. One of those objecting to PBR in principle (a civil society representative) emailed Rosalind Eyben:

I don't think the Board really understood the implications of this when it approved this new model – and [recipient] countries certainly were not aware of what this means in practice.

Despite some discomfort about where the PBR model was taking them, most board members found it difficult to challenge the proposal. Everyone wants results! Eyben's informant, on the other hand, was keenly aware of how PBR risks instrumentalizing education, apart from its possible perverse effects (see Chapter 2). He feared that judging children's performance against measurable learning outcomes would become the sole yardstick for value, crowding out a transformational approach to education as a process of empowerment.

PBR is one of the mechanisms of a 'results and evidence agenda' that seeks to improve and manage development aid through protocols, procedures, and mechanisms for reporting, tracking, disbursing, appraising, and evaluating its effectiveness and impact. As detailed inChapter 2, the agenda became influentialin the first decade of the present century, with, by around 2010, an increasing number of development practitioners concerned about what they saw to be the agenda's pernicious effects. As in the GPE case, they worried that the results and evidence agenda undermined the potential for development aid to support transformational development and risked reinforcing power relations and structures that reproduce rather than diminish inequality, injustice, and the non-fulfilment of human rights. Concerned practitioners mentioned the time and money wasted in negotiating with funders over the utility and feasibility of imposed protocols and complained of the accountability pressure that forced the generation of 'sausage numbers' (Chapter 3), leaving limited time and energy for adaptive and responsive programming in support of complex change processes. One worried senior official from a United Nations agency rang the authors of this chapter to explain how his agency had negotiated for several months with a government funder:

They themselves knew it was ridiculous what they were asking for but they said it was political. In the end it comes down to money and for X millions of dollars we had to agree. But we rely on you academics working on the flanks to start a conversation about this.

Where could these and the growing number of other concerned voices discuss the trends, consequences, and options?

The initial impetus for what became the Big Push Forward (BPF) was a conference in May 2010 in the Netherlands about evaluation in complex contexts (Guijt et al., 2011). Although it was borne out of a deep disquiet about how the term 'rigour' had been captured by advocates of certain impact approaches, most participants discussed methodological innovations and challenges with little reference to the shrinking political space within which the methods discussed could be used. Knowing that many practitioners were interested in the politics of how impact and results are defined and assessed, the authors organized a meeting in Britain where more than 70 participants shared their experiences and reaction to the results and evidence agenda. Six months later (April 2011) we launched the BPF to make the results and evidence agenda a legitimate subject for public debate. Our first blog laid out the challenge:

Hard evidence, rigorous data, conclusive proof, value for money, evidence-based policy are tantalizing terms promising clarity about what works and what should be funded in international development. Yet behind these terms lie definitional tussles, vested interests and contested worldviews. For those who hold the purse strings, certain ways of knowing and assessing impact are considered more legitimate than others. Yet increasingly people are recognizing the need for multiple and mixed methods and approaches to better understand complex change and that these compared to imposed standards are more likely to lead to fair assessments helping us learn how to support a fairer world.

In the two years that followed, development practitioners commented on our blogs and debated the issues at meetings and workshops with us, including in Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In Australia, for example, we contributed to a workshop on evaluation methods for staff of AusAID (now part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), organized by the Development Leadership Programme. Participants discussed the practical challenges staff faced in juggling methodological and political demands in the messiness of development programming in complex contexts (Roche and Kelly, 2012). In these forums, practitioners spoke of managing these demands in ways that would enable them to pursue approaches more...