Basic principles

According to the Regulations for Financial Management in the State, all public entities are required to ensure that evaluations are conducted to obtain information about efficiency, goal achievement, and results within all or parts of the entity’s responsibility and activities. 

For assistance, a specific Instruction for the evaluation of Norwegian development cooperation has been developed, which adheres to the procedures and standards outlined in the underlying Evaluation Strategy with Procedures. The instruction establishes the following objectives for evaluation activities: 

• Evaluations must be of high quality. 

• Evaluations must be credible and independent. 

• Evaluations must be relevant. 

• Evaluations should contribute to increased learning and the use of knowledge. 

Through this work, evaluations are intended to produce knowledge that can inform future improvements in assistance (learning), as well as to document whether the expected results have been achieved (accountability). The emphasis between learning and accountability functions may differ between evaluations. 

Prioritization of what should be evaluated is based on the Regulations for Financial Management in the State, which highlight the criteria of materiality, uniqueness, and risk. 

The evaluation process itself follows quality standards for evaluation developed by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which include: 

• Evaluations are conducted by external professional groups that remain objective and independent from those responsible for planning and implementing the relevant measures. 

• Evaluations must meet strict quality and methodological requirements, including full transparency regarding the basis for all findings and conclusions, triangulation (double-checking) of important results, and careful establishment of causal relationships. 

• Stakeholders must have the opportunity to express their views during the evaluation process, and if disagreements arise between stakeholders and evaluators, these are reflected in the final report. 

• All evaluations are made publicly available. 

A key challenge in evaluation is to assess causality. If significant positive changes occur in a country or target group, it can be difficult to determine whether this is the result of assistance. Positive developments may instead stem from factors such as economic growth or improved governance. Conversely, negative trends do not necessarily mean that assistance has failed; assistance may have prevented worse outcomes, or, in some cases, may have contributed to negative developments. These complexities often make it hard to establish the true impact of assistance. 

When the effects of assistance can be determined with reasonable certainty, this is referred to as attribution. The best way to answer attribution questions is to consider: What would have happened without assistance? This is known as counterfactual analysis. However, such analyses can be very resource-intensive and, in many cases, impractical. Often, it is only possible to demonstrate that assistance has contributed to a change—this is called contribution analysis.