The politics of performance evaluation: Independent evaluation at the International Monetary Fund

How has the Fund institutionalized independent evaluation as a means of assessing its performance? This paper process-traces the contentious creation of the Fund’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO). I use primary interviews conducted at the Fund headquarters in 2008–2010 and Fund archive documents dating back to the beginning of the debate over independent evaluation in 1992 to analyze the interaction of internal and external actors and interests that led finally to the creation of the IEO in 2001. I then comment on the ‘performance of the performance evaluator.’ I draw from a recent external evaluation of the IEO (Lissakers et al. 2006), as well as interviews and secondary sources, to identify enduring contestation over the IEO’s function and scope of authority and to discern how this has affected the ability of the IEO to inform and shape the Fund’s process and outcome performance. To this end, I discuss four issues currently facing the IEO: the need to establish both actual and perceived independence, the problems of ambiguous or non-existent metrics for assessing Fund performance, difficulties in balancing candor of evaluation reports with credibility in the eyes of multiple constituencies, and the challenges of fostering a culture of learning in the Fund.