The Politics of Evaluation in the Global South: Decolonizing Policy Assessment for Equitable Governance

Introduction: The Hidden Politics of Policy Evaluation

Public policy evaluation is frequently framed as a neutral technical exercise—a systematic application of methods to determine the effectiveness, efficiency, and relevance of government interventions. This framing obscures a more complex reality: evaluation is a political act shaped by power relations, historical contexts, and economic interests. In the Global South, the evaluative function is particularly susceptible to distortions arising from colonial legacies, authoritarian governance structures, and the conditionalities imposed by external funding sources.

A 2025 handbook chapter by Anis Ben Brik, published in the Handbook of Public Policy Evaluation in the Global South (Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 33–58), provides a systematic analysis of these dynamics. The chapter documents how evaluation practices in developing regions often produce outcomes that lack objectivity and local relevance, and instead serve to reinforce asymmetries between domestic actors and international donors. This article extracts the core economic logic underlying those findings and examines the roles of institutional weakness, donor influence, and civil society in shaping evaluation regimes. It then outlines a reform agenda aimed at shifting evaluation from a tool of external control to one of genuine local empowerment and equitable governance.

Colonial Legacies and Institutional Weaknesses: The Historical Context

The contemporary evaluation landscape in the Global South cannot be understood without reference to its historical antecedents. Colonial administrative systems established governance patterns that prioritized extraction over participation, centralized decision-making over local accountability, and external standards over indigenous knowledge systems. These patterns persisted after independence, often reinforced by authoritarian regimes that viewed independent evaluation as a threat to regime stability (Ben Brik, 2025).

Institutional weaknesses—limited technical capacity, fragmented data systems, chronic underfunding, and politicized civil services—compound the problem. When evaluation units lack independence and resources, they become susceptible to manipulation by political elites or become perfunctory exercises that satisfy donor reporting requirements without genuinely informing policy. The persistence of top-down, technocratic approaches mirrors colonial governance models: external consultants imported from the Global North design evaluation frameworks, apply imported metrics, and produce reports that speak more to funders’ accountability demands than to the lived realities of local populations.

The chapter references works by Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock on institutional capability traps, as well as Bardach on feasibility analysis, to underscore how path dependencies in state capacity constrain the possibilities for meaningful evaluation reform. Without addressing these structural roots, any effort to improve evaluation quality risks reproducing the same power asymmetries.

External Donors and the Commodification of Evaluation

Perhaps the most consequential driver of evaluation politics in the Global South is the influence of external donors. Bilateral aid agencies, multilateral development banks, and private foundations collectively fund a substantial proportion of public policy interventions in low- and middle-income countries. These donors typically impose evaluation requirements as conditions for disbursement, creating a de facto market for evaluation services that prioritizes accountability to funders over responsiveness to local needs.

Ben Brik (2025) identifies this dynamic as a form of “evaluation for control.” Donor-driven evaluations often employ standardized methodologies—randomized controlled trials, cost-benefit analysis with Northern discount rates, logframe indicators—that are ill-suited to the complexity and context-specificity of Global South settings. The resulting reports serve primarily to justify continued funding flows and to demonstrate “results” to constituencies in donor capitals. Local policymakers and communities are reduced to passive subjects of evaluation rather than active participants in defining what counts as success.

The hidden economic logic is straightforward: evaluation becomes a commodity. International consulting firms and Northern universities capture a significant share of evaluation contracts, while local experts are relegated to data collection roles. This creates a cycle of dependency: countries lack the financial and technical autonomy to design their own evaluation systems, and donors have little incentive to cede control over a process that validates their investments. The chapter’s reference to Brinkerhoff and Carothers on aid effectiveness and governance conditionality supports this analysis, linking commodified evaluation to broader debates about ownership and alignment in development cooperation.

Civil Society as a Countervailing Force

Amid these structural constraints, civil society organizations (CSOs) have emerged as an essential counterbalance. Ben Brik (2025) emphasizes that CSOs can advocate for participatory, context-sensitive evaluation frameworks that reflect local realities and knowledge systems. By integrating indigenous metrics, community feedback mechanisms, and grassroots accountability processes, these organizations challenge the dominance of donor-driven indicators and help reorient evaluation toward democratic accountability.

Empirical examples from the chapter illustrate how coalitions of CSOs in countries such as India, South Africa, and Brazil have developed alternative evaluation protocols that incorporate qualitative narratives, participatory rural appraisal, and community scorecards. These approaches do not reject rigor; rather, they expand the definition of evidence to include locally valid forms of knowledge. The effect is twofold: evaluation becomes more responsive to the needs of intended beneficiaries, and it strengthens the political leverage of marginalized groups vis-à-vis both state and donor actors.

Balancing external influences remains a constant challenge. CSOs themselves often depend on donor funding, creating potential conflicts of interest. The chapter notes that this tension can be mitigated through formal coalitions that pool resources, develop shared standards, and maintain independence from any single funder. Without such collective action, civil society risks being co-opted into the same commodified evaluation system it seeks to reform.

Toward a Reform Agenda: Decolonization, Participation, and Capacity

Ben Brik (2025) proposes a comprehensive reform agenda for public policy evaluation in the Global South. The agenda rests on three pillars: decolonization, participatory approaches, and institutional capacity strengthening.

Decolonizing evaluation requires a deliberate effort to dismantle the epistemological hierarchies that privilege Northern knowledge systems. This means recognizing indigenous and local knowledge as legitimate sources of evidence, adapting evaluation frameworks to local cultural and political contexts, and ensuring that evaluation questions are framed by domestic stakeholders rather than external funders. The chapter’s reference to Bates’ work on analytic narratives and Chatterjee’s critique of postcolonial governance provides theoretical grounding for this shift.

Participatory approaches move beyond tokenistic consultation to genuine co-design and co-implementation of evaluations. Citizens, community leaders, and frontline service providers become evaluators rather than subjects. This not only improves the validity of findings—since local actors have contextual knowledge that external experts lack—but also builds ownership of results, increasing the likelihood that evaluations will actually be used to inform policy decisions.

Strengthening institutional capacity involves sustained investment in domestic evaluation units, universities, and professional associations. It also requires changes to donor practices: longer funding cycles, fewer conditionalities, and a willingness to fund national evaluation strategies rather than project-specific assessments. The chapter explicitly links this to the work of Cohen and Contandriopoulos on organizational learning and policy analysis, arguing that capacity must be both technical and political.

Conclusion: Future Trends and Unresolved Tensions

The politics of evaluation in the Global South is not static. Several trends will shape its trajectory over the next decade. First, the growing demand for localization within the development sector—accelerated by movements such as the “shift the power” campaign—may gradually compel donors to cede greater control over evaluation design and use. Second, the proliferation of digital data collection tools and artificial intelligence could either democratize evaluation (by lowering costs) or deepen inequalities (if access remains concentrated in the North). Third, the emergence of South-South cooperation networks offers an alternative pathway: countries can learn from each other’s evaluation innovations rather than relying solely on Northern templates.

Yet fundamental tensions remain unresolved. As long as donor funding represents a large share of the resources available for evaluation in the Global South, the structural incentive to prioritize external accountability will persist. Civil society organizations can push back, but they cannot fully substitute for systemic reform of the international aid architecture. The chapter by Ben Brik (2025) does not offer easy solutions; it provides a rigorous diagnosis of the political economy underpinning evaluation practices. Whether that diagnosis leads to change depends on the willingness of state actors, donors, and civil society to confront the uncomfortable truth that evaluation, like any policy instrument, is never neutral.

References cited in this article draw primarily on Ben Brik, A. (2025). The politics of public policy evaluation in the Global South. In Handbook of Public Policy Evaluation in the Global South (pp. 33–58). Edward Elgar Publishing. DOI: 10.4337/9781035351909.00008.