Evaluating institutional sustainability in development programmes: beyond dollars and cents

Abstract

The issue of sustainability, its definition and measurement, is crucial to current debates in development policy and aid reform. But while all donors demand it few define it in operational terms. This poses serious methodological challenges for evaluators since there are no accepted and uncontested indicators of institutional sustainability. They therefore resort to using quantitative measures such as the calculation of a ‘sustainability rate’. This paper examines different views of institutional sustainability and identifies some of their shortcomings from the standpoint of programme evaluation. Institutional sustainability is seen as a capacity rather than a financial issue. It then suggests the need for qualitative indicators of sustainability and argues that the institution's capacity to learn—as reflected in the relative importance accorded to action and reflection, the way in which the institution deals with ‘discordant information’, and its capacity to conduct and use evaluations—is a key aspect of sustainability. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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