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The Other Lessons from Impact Assessment
With any impact assessment, the focus is on the results of the rigorous policy analysis in terms of beneficary impact. However, these are not the only lessons; on the contrary, the process' management produces knowledge in terms of stakeholders, the intervention's design and context, that are quite useful, not only for the policy itself but for future assessments.
June 13, 2019
Below a list of three of these lessons and some practical examples:
- The assessment involves engaging with the intervention's stakeholders and that interaction creates knowledge. The implementers' features, such as their work dynamics, technical and political capabilities, as well as the key stakeholders, become exposed when meeting the work teams. For example, identifying individuals who act as project leaders and enablers becomes a very useful input throughout the assessment management process and is often critical to project feasibility.
- Similarly, the interventions' characteristics become clear during an assessment. Details in terms of design limitations, management challenges (data availability, logistics), project conception in terms of phases, timelines and budget are evidenced while devising an assessment strategy. For example, an assessment of a school with low enrollment rates—which creates a statistical power problem—may identify the need to include a promotional campaign as part of the school’s policy, which may not have been Initially included.
- But the policies' context is another key factor that an assessor must be familiar with in order to adapt. Understanding policy constraints in terms of the interests involved, such as the proximity of an election cycle, or the challenges associated with beneficiaries (culture, interests, etc.) as in the case of training young adolescents, allows us to map an initiative and the possible sources of challenges during plan implementation.
In this sense, even in those cases where the impact assessment cannot be performed, there's a universe of learning possibilities that assessors can share with their implementing counterparts and other peers. The documented and data-based systematization of these lessons allows us to build capacities of stakeholders (academia, policy-makers, implementers and assessors) for future interventions, of either the same policy or similar cases, in a context where assessors play an increasingly vital role in the process of designing and managing public policies.
