Assessing Monitoring and Evaluation Systems in Water and Development Cooperation

Abstract

Water and development projects are development cooperation’s specifically focused on the water sector such as sanitation, drinking water, and water management. In these type of development programmes, governmental or public organizations that manage the water sector in a country are usually involved. These organizations use their financial resources to support development in low and middle income countries in the Global South, with the aim to achieve societal impact, often by contributing to the water focussed Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. As the financial resources often come from governmental agencies, it is public money. For the reason that achieving societal impact comes with its challenges, it is important that the recipients can provide accountability of what is done with the financial resources. This is done with the use of a monitoring and evaluation system, which is often required by donor agencies as a mean to provide accountability. Monitoring and evaluation systems involve a variety of actors. The system can have a variety of uses. In development cooperation they are mainly used to provide accountability towards donors and to learn how the cooperation can be improved. However, there is not always a good balance between those two uses, as the focus often lies more on accountability, which could cause missed opportunities to improve the effectiveness of the cooperation and therefore the societal impact. Therefore, this research focuses on the actor interactions in water and development cooperation and how the monitoring and evaluation systems influences the societal impact. This research is scoped as a case study of the IHE Delft Partnership Programme for Water and Development (DUPC2)...