Results-Based Evaluation in Argentina’s Public Sector: an Analysis in the Light of other Experiences in Latin America

This article focuses on three across-the-board results-based evaluation initiatives in Argentina’s public sector, and compares them with the approaches to public sector evaluation that CLAD identified in a recent comparative study of the evaluation initiatives of Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay. It found that these four countries adopted results-based evaluation initiatives following one of two broad approaches. Chile and Uruguay followed the “budgeting-oriented model”, that is an approach in which the evaluation mechanisms were adopted with the aim to inform the budget allocation process and the management of public sector organization, while paying little attention to the needs of sectoral policy planning. By contrast, Colombia and Costa Rica are examples of the “planning-oriented model” -an approach to evaluation oriented to inform planning and policy formulation at both the sector and the organizational level, and to enhance political accountability, that disregards the connection between public sector management results and the national budget cycle.

The article argues that the three Argentine evaluation initiatives are too unrelated and different from each other to be regarded as part of a single approach that can in turn be identified with one of the two models described by the study of CLAD. Rather, it is maintained that Argentina’s results-based evaluation initiatives appear to have followed a “range” of approaches instead. In effect, while one of the evaluation initiatives resembles the budgeting-oriented model quite closely, a second one mirrors the planning-oriented model’s focus on policy formulation and planning including its disregard for the budgeting cycle. With its strong emphasis on organizational management needs and its poor links to both the national budget cycle and sector-level planning, the third evaluation initiative seems to lie somewhere between the other two within that range of approaches.

In order to make possible and more systematic assessment of public sector management results, the adoption of these evaluation mechanisms represents an important step forward. However, the article raises a concern that, by relying on separate and apparently unrelated evaluation mechanisms to feed into the budgeting and the planning processes, the Argentine approach to results-based evaluation may have set an unnecessary “ceiling” to the multiple benefits that could otherwise be expected. The article also highlights some weaknesses in the implementation of the three Argentine evaluation initiatives that may even interfere with the full accomplishment of their quite distinct specific objectives.