Tools in internal and external evaluations

Abstract

This chapter examines whether and how the difference in the location of evaluators influences the choice of approaches, tools, and procedural issues in policy evaluation. It illustrates the differences in these dimensions of evaluation through a discussion of external and internal evaluation in the case of the Asian Development Bank and multilateral development aid. External evaluators may have a broader perspective and independence, but internal evaluators may have higher-information processing capacity and access to specialized information and records, which external evaluators may not. Impact evaluation is primarily concerned with causal attribution of changes in outcomes to the program or policy. While internal evaluators might be more interested in specific cases, external evaluators often use such techniques to generalize across cases.