Publications

The report at hand presents first results derived from a quantitative impact evaluation of an intervention for enhanced land use planning in the Philippines. The SIMPLE (Sustainable Integrated Management and Planning for Local Government Ecosystems) approach embedded in the Philippine-German cooperation’s “Environment and Rural Development (EnRD)” program was implemented between 2006 and 2015, managed by the Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

• Garcia Schustereder, M., L. Hohfeld, M. Lech and G. Leppert (2016), Donor-Assisted Land-use Planning in the Philippines: Insights from a Multi-Level Survey, German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval), Bonn.

This article uses the example of European budget support to show the differences in applying principal–agent and collective action analysis to the donor–recipient relationship and the incentives of European donors. Our results show that the Paris Declaration, while formulating the ‘right’ principles, carries a number of assumptions regarding the (cap)ability of donors to act collectively. This assumption, however, fails to include the political economy of European donors and their own political, institutional and individual incentives that undermined this capability substantially. In other words, the domestic political costs and incentives for European donors to implement the Paris agenda, and in particular aid modalities such as budget support, were not given enough consideration when the aid effectiveness agenda was formulated.

• The article in Development Policy Review

• Koch, S., S. Leiderer, J. Faust and N. Molenaers (2017) The Rise and Demise of European Budget support: Political Economy of Collective European Union Donor Action. In: Development Policy Review, Vol. 35, Issue 4, 455-473.

• Hartmann, C. und K. Vorwerk (2017), develoPPP.de: Innovative Lösungsansätze für die EZ durch Entwicklungspartnerschaften mit der Wirtschaft? DEval Policy Brief 2/2017, Deutsches Evaluierungsinstitut der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (DEval), Bonn.

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• Steckhan, H., T. Schwedersky, L. Ahrens & M. Bruder (2018), "Herausforderungen der menschenrechtsbasierten Evaluierung von politischen Strategiepapieren: Das Beispiel der Evaluierung des 'Aktionsplans zur Inklusion von Menschen mit Behinderungen' des BMZ", Zeitschrift für Evaluation, 17(1), S. 108-129.

Current methodological debates related to theory-based evaluations (TBE) focus on improving the explanatory strength of these approaches and how to integrate mechanisms as analytical concepts. Particularly in complex aid interventions, when multiple elements are expected to interact and thus create added value, exploring mechanisms as an analytical tool can be promising. This paper contributes to the discussion on the use of TBE for evaluating complex aid interventions by sharing experiences from a recent evaluation of accompanying measures to general budget support.

• Schmitt, J., F. Krisch (2017): A Mechanism-Centered Approach to Evaluating Complex Aid Interventions: The Case of Accompanying Measures to Budget Support, in: Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, Volume 13, Issue 28.

This article provides evidence on the individual and country-level determinants of citizens’ support for political conditionality in foreign aid, using novel survey data for 27 European countries. Based on the welfare state literature and existing public opinion research in foreign aid, we expect citizens with more rightist political orientations as well as those who do not perceive their own state apparatus to function in a meritocratic way to be more likely to support political conditionality. Our multi-level analysis supports these hypotheses in general, but also shows that the effect of political orientations on support for political conditionality in foreign aid is limited to traditional EU donor countries, where the left/right-cleavage has been dominant in politics.

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcms.12556

• Bodenstein, T. and J. Faust (2017), Who Cares? European Public Opinion on Foreign Aid and Political Conditionality, in: JOurnal of Common Market Studies, 55 (5), 955-973, doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12556