Mexico's M&E system : scaling up from the sectoral to the national level

Abstract

This paper provides a brief review of Mexico's progressive movement from a sectoral to a government-wide Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system. It highlights the critical institutional reforms introduced, the policy decisions, and the most important operational steps that were taken, offering an account of the political context within which such changes and decisions were possible. The paper emphasizes the specific role of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Policy (CONEVAL) as an innovative development, which furthered institutionalization of evaluation and a results focus at the federal government level through the implementation of the System for Performance Evaluation (SED). A quick review of the government-wide system's strengths and main challenges for the future is offered. A conclusion of this paper is that after the 2005 reforms, Mexico entered into an advanced stage of performance-based management that is grounded on strong institutional foundations: legislation has provided a modern budget framework, sound M&E tools and arrangements have been developed, and accountability and transparency conditions have been created to make most of the changes operational. However, the authors also conclude that full institutionalization is not yet complete. Sustainability of the system and the reforms, as much as consolidation of the implementation process, will depend on how the government addresses a number of related challenges ahead including, among others, assimilation of the reforms, greater utilization of performance information, capacity building, increasing knowledge capacity at the sub-national level, and harmonization and rationalization of evaluation work among different responsible agencies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.