Evaluating institutional sustainability in development programmes: beyond dollars and cents
✍ Scribed by Deryck R. Brown
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 167 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0954-1748
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The issue of sustainability, its de®nition and measurement, is crucial to current debates in development policy and aid reform. But while all donors demand it few de®ne it in operational terms. This poses serious methodological challenges for evaluators since there are no accepted and uncontested indicators of institutional sustainability. They therefore resort to using quantitative measures such as the calculation of a `sustainability rate'.
This paper examines dierent views of institutional sustainability and identi®es some of their shortcomings from the standpoint of programme evaluation. Institutional sustainability is seen as a capacity rather than a ®nancial issue. It then suggests the need for qualitative indicators of sustainability and argues that the institution's capacity to learn Ð as re¯ected in the relative importance accorded to action and re¯ection, the way in which the institution deals with `discordant information', and its capacity to conduct and use evaluations Ð is a key aspect of sustainability.