Paris Declaration country evaluations: how solid is the evidence? META-Evaluation of the Country Evaluations of the Phase II Paris Declaration Evaluation

The evaluation of the Paris Declaration (PD) is one of the most important and challenging evaluative undertakings of the past decade in the aid sector. The PD evaluation commissioned by the OECD/DAC Evaluation Network consists of a set of independent crosscountry and donor evaluations which were carried out in two phases. The scope and importance of this evaluation makes it a particularly suitable subject for a meta-evaluation. Our 'evaluation of the evaluation’ complements the official meta-evaluation of the synthesis report in that it assesses all country evaluation reports available in English (15 out of 21 reports) using the OECD/DAC Evaluation Quality Standards. Two research questions are central in our undertaking: Is the quality of the country evaluation reports good enough to be included in the synthesis report? Do the reports properly comply with the evaluation framework to permit comparison of evaluation across countries? The findings of the meta-evaluation demonstrate that comparability of country evaluation reports is satisfactory. The quality of evidence, however, is questionable, due to various limitations and constraints that plagued several country evaluations. Therefore, the inclusion of some of the country reports in the evaluation synthesis report is questionable.