The Big Push Forward is inviting case studies as evidence about the politics of evidence for sharing at next April’s conference. Please send us your stories. If you prefer your name not to be published, we will help you edit the story to protect your anonymity.
Development projects and programmes are increasingly being planned, appraised, implemented and evaluated in terms of ‘results’ and ‘evidence’. ‘Evidence’ is about what works to solve a problem which leads to action – intervention or treatment of the problem – that delivers ‘results’ which are reported upon and possibly also evaluated. The two discourses share in common a particular understanding of causality, efficiency and accountability that originated in and remains more prevalent in countries with an anglo-saxon empiricist tradition. However, through the dominance of English-language based global institutions such as the World Bank, they are spreading widely within the international development sector and into developing countries.
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