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In recent years, self-evaluation has been recommended for capacity development efforts in response to a growing awareness that externally led evaluations are often inappropriate or counterproductive. Self-evaluation has been seen as a means of assessing the needs for capacity development, of developing effective strategies and of improving existing or future programmes. The implication is that capacity development efforts require an internal evaluation capacity in order to ensure their own relevance, effectiveness and efficiency.

While this change in understanding the role of evaluation in capacity development efforts is laudable, questions remain about the practicality of self-evaluation approaches in international development cooperation and about the extent to which self-evaluation can contribute to learning processes, to performance improvement and to the development of evaluation capacity within organisations. Few capacity development efforts have been systematically self-evaluated and documented in ways that shed light on these important topics.

It was these considerations that formed the rationale for an action-learning project on Evaluating Capacity Development (ECD) by a group of evaluation specialists, led by the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR). Six research and development organisations from Asia, Africa and Latin America and their international partners supporting their capacity development efforts participated in this project and evaluated their own capacity development efforts through a series of self-evaluation studies. The evaluations addressed questions of immediate interest to the participating organisations as well as a set of five ‘guiding questions’ formulated jointly by participants.

The contributions in this issue of Capacity.Org review what has been learned from this project. The articles are based on a book authored by the ECD project’s participants, to be published jointly by ISNAR, the International Development Research Centre and the Colombian Centre for Tropical Agriculture in mid-2003. The first article introduces the ECD project and summarises its methodology. The second article outlines the understanding of organisational capacity development and its evaluation as developed in the context of this project. The third explains why managers should be concerned with organisational capacity development and its evaluation. The fourth presents the elements of a holistic approach that managers can use to foster organisational capacity development. The fifth explains how to build partnerships for capacity development. The sixth introduces practical approaches for evaluating organisational capacity development, and the final article explains how evaluation can be used to strengthen capacity and improve an organisation’s performance. Some of the case studies are summarised in boxes to illustrate the practical effects of this approach on the capacity development of the organisations involved. A list of sources of further information on the topic is included in the selected bibliography.

For an overview of contributions made, see www.capacity.org/17/intro.html

2003-04-30

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