The Global Evaluation Initiative (2022) introduced the Monitoring and Evaluation Systems Analysis (MESA) as “a diagnostic tool that guides country stakeholders in gathering, structuring and analyzing information on the current capacity of their country’s M&E ecosystem. It helps identify what is working well and what needs to be improved, informing capacity-development strategies meant to strengthen the economic, political, and social context that enables M&E to flourish.”
While the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2006) offers a broader view, describing ECD as “the process whereby people, organizations, and society as a whole unleash, strengthen, create, adapt, and maintain the capacity to produce and use evaluation to effectively support accountability and learning. Producing and using evaluations requires individual skills and knowledge, organizational systems and policies, and an enabling environment.”
Preskill and Boyle (2008) further refined the definition by focusing on teaching and learning strategies. According to them, “ECD involves the design and implementation of teaching and learning strategies to help individuals, groups and organizations learn about what constitutes effective, useful and professional evaluation practice. For evaluation practice to be sustained, participants must be provided with leadership support, incentives, resources, and opportunities to transfer their learning about evaluation to their everyday work.”
Furthermore, Wingate et al (2022) emphasized ECD “as an intentional effort to develop evaluation K/S/A among organizational personnel and others involved in program operations and decision-making. At the organizational or program levels, ECD efforts may also focus on developing a learning culture and establishing the necessary supports and policies for sustained evaluative efforts.”
Similarly, Stockdill, Baizerman, and Compton (2002) described ECD “as the intentional work to continuously create and sustain overall organizational processes that make the quality evaluation and its uses routine.”
Finally, Michelle Tarsilla (2017) expanded ECD as “A process consisting of:
- Individuals’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes
- Organizations’ capabilities
- Institutions’ readiness toward contextually relevant planning, management, implementation, and use of evaluation at any level – global, regional, national, or sub-national”
As the consortium traversed through these definitions, it became clear that a comprehensive and inclusive understanding of ECD needed to incorporate various elements. Eventually, the consortium arrived this conceptualization:
- “Strategies that enhance individual and institutional knowledge, skills, and attitudes to conduct effective and quality evaluation and developing evaluative thinking at a broader ecosystem level.
- Organizational support which institutionalizes evaluative thinking and provides support for the transfer of learning, thus making evaluation practice sustainable.”
By intersecting multiple perspectives, it arrived at a definition that balances the individual, organizational, and systemic components needed to sustain evaluation capacity in practice.
