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To optimise the use of resources available into improved intervention and to ensure public support,
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those in charge of operations need to ask themselves two sets of questions.
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The first thing is, are we doing things right? So are implementing our plans as efficiently as we can?
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Or can we improve on how we do what we're doing? And the measurement for this is often the measurements that are made,
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often called measurement of implementation, measurement of performance or measurement of efficiency.
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That's one set of measurements that I use. The other set of questions that one needs to ask yourself is, are we doing the right things?
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So is our plan actually any good?
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Do we need to change what we're doing, not just how we do it, but actually do we need to do completely different things?
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And this is what we call the measurement of effects.
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And these two evaluation process, hopefully they should be able to do if we implement them is a of course to do.
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Also, all we're doing right. Things right. But also what they they should be able to do is to increase the sophistication of our understanding and
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find to the hypothesis that we have our theory of change so that we improve the impact of what we do.
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And really important as well of all these, these measurement processes should generate some form recommendations again.
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And since they're so central for the for the success operations, one could assume that these are very well established.
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But the funny thing is they're not.
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Well, it's not so funny, actually, but but they're not it's surprising that one reason is really that it's difficult.
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And this paper addresses two sets of different difficulties. The first one is challenges that we produce ourselves.
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And how do we make life more difficult for ourselves? To improve our evaluation processes.
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And then the second set is the methodological problems that are inherent to measuring effects.
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So I look at those two and I conclude with some recommendations.
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And if we look at the challenges we set ourself how we make our own life more difficult.
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I'm going to take a step back a bit from Stuart focussed very much on on just the UK approach.
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And we have to look at a bit, step back and look at them often at multinational context as well.
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I think it's quite clear that we all know that the current operations tend to be more ambitious than previous interventions.
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We don't just try to work in war with or in conflicts.
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Bachelor types work on complex the fight to root causes and so forth. We also see that that we heard that this morning about the normative influence,
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were they the liberal peace theory that we're not really just trying to to stop symptoms, i.e. stop people from fighting, stop starvation?
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We actually want to to change the way people think. And I think that's it's quite clear that there's far more ambitious.
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We often hear this in the military context. We often hear this slogan about winning hearts and minds.
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That's not what today's operations are about at all. It's about changing hearts, mind.
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We want people to think differently. And if we want people to think differently.
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Reasonable democracy. What that, of course, means is and that's quite difficult to accept for many people is that success,
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operation's success is not something that we can determine with our own actions.
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It actually depends on the activities of the local population and how they engage in peace processes and so forth.
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But at the same time, they're not just more ambitious. These operations off of it's far more ambiguous.
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They what we actually try to achieve that peacekeeper was easy.
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Stopping people from fighting humanitarian operations are quite easy to understand what it's all about.
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But what we're trying to do is trying to fix states. And what does that mean?
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How do you do it? And this this ambiguous this is reflected in the strategic documents, which I think have a tendency,
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although they say a lot, but they have a tendency to be apple pie statements.
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You can look, for instance, at Afghanistan. They have to bring this together.
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The goal of so many actors that they could include almost anything.
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If you look at the aims are very broad that are acceptable to all,
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you can just look at what nature had difficulties in in deciding whether it's conducting counterinsurgency campaign or what it's trying to achieve.
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If we look at the Afghan National Development Strategy, it has a hundred and sixteen expected outcomes.
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It's that they don't necessarily set a realistic timeline set.
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The Afghan compact doesn't know the end even when they try.
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And the aid is fair enough to be fair. And it tries to give some direction.
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It tries to set some priorities. These priorities don't actually translate into national agendas of the contributors.
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So they they while everybody can argue that whatever they do in this example, Afghanistan complies with the strategic document,
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the A.D.s, the Afghan compact and so forth, that they actually have very, very different things.
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And that, I would argue, is is a sign of or evidence of that these strategic documents tend to be apple pie statements.
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The question is, of course, why? And the answer is very, very simple. It's because they all motivated by different motives to to intervene.
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There is a part of altruism, of course, making life better for the Afghans.
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There is the element of national security because we see a threat emerging in Afghanistan, in the region.
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There is this argument about NATO's credibility. There are arguments about bilateral relationships with the US.
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So each country, each contributor, each organisation decides on many a whole host of motives how much they're going to contribute.
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And of course, if we look at Afghanistan in the centre,
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we're going to see that we don't contribute enough to actually we're not as committed as we need to be to fix this in any short term.
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Turning it around, we can see if we look at it globally,
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that we actually overcommit resources to Afghanistan compared to the other 30 or so, the equally vulnerable states.
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Therefore. Exactly, BP will be set up of reasons. So what we're left with here, or if this is left,
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we're going to continue to have rather weak strategic direction that some people can argue that this is actually quite a good thing.
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It gives us some advantages because it's it gives us a more flexible approach.
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Bottom up approach, which you which is normally counterinsurgency context.
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There is, however, real disadvantages as well, and that is that it risks to be fragmented.
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So we don't achieve to reinforce success. And I think this is something that is really evident in regional command south in Afghanistan.
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At first glance, if we look at regional command south, everything seems to be very neatly organised.
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And one would assume that the evaluation process is really helpful as well.
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The way it's organised, what they've done is quite simple. Arguably, the the intervention is led by ISAF Regional Command SOF, the South,
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which has outlined an operational plan with a three year perspective that the current model is from 2008 to 2003.
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And they then work in four landru operations.
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And these four lines of operations over the course reflected in the strategic documents, the A.D.s and the, I think, conflict as well.
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So for security. ISAF has responsibility for capacity building of the Afghan National Security Forces.
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That is led by the U.S. that combined security transition command.
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And for the third line of operation governance and the fourth development and
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reconstruction are led by the parties and they are now merged together to two,
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governance and development to reconstruction.
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And this operational plan is quite helpful for the assessment, because what it does, it says on these line four lines of operations,
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it has identified certain decisive points over time of three years that need to be achieved some parallel,
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what needs to be achieved and what line of operations. So.
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So they have quite a good idea of how they think that is going to work and to monitor progress towards this,
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to fact figure out whether we're moving in the right direction and if we're moving as fast as we can.
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The joint effects assessment,
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so in Regional Command South has set up a evaluation to which is called the Regional Common Operations Picture after they report quarterly.
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And they base their their assessments on opinion polls and on the questionnaires that they give to the task forces.
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So the people under their command, both of the task forces and the PR team.
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So all of this seems to be very well set up. The problem is it doesn't work very well.
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Why? Well, it seems that that they're not getting the answers they need from these subordinate units.
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At least the quality and the engagement from them vary considerably over time.
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Which, of course, affects the validity of the data said they say they work on.
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So why is this? And I think there's there's again, there the two main reasons for this.
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The first is we can say it's structural.
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What we see is that contributors don't reave their own priorities from the operational plan.
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But our CSA setup, they look at national preferences, national pressures,
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and that decides what they contribute with and what they want their own forces to do or their own agency to do.
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RC South leverage to somehow make them complacent. Small as well, because, of course, they have no resources of their own.
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And if you can't allocate resources, you actually have very little impact.
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What happens? This is WhiteWave, the archtop, the evaluation tool and the operational plan.
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If Nashed net nations and agencies don't miss their comply with it,
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what it tries to measure progress against doesn't necessarily serve what these countries want to know.
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So there is that this is secure. Let me just give an example up of Canada.
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UK is another example, by the way. But I'll skip that since we talked about that a bit.
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But the Canadians have decided to withdraw in 2011, just like the Dutch in two 10 in 2010.
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And the governments, rather than saying we want to fix Afghanistan, we want to fix Kandahar, which is their priority.
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They say that's not what we'd want to do. They have to explain to the public at home why they're there.
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So they have to show that there is a progress.
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So what they've done is they set six priorities and three senators projects with very concrete and districts projects.
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These are concrete benchmarks as well. And these are not taken from the operational plan.
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So what they do is if they get questionnaires from the Arkell, it doesn't really do the trick for them.
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They don't get the measurements they need to sell their progress to to Canada.
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And guess what they do if they're very busy? Well, they might not give this process high priority.
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The same we can say, but as I said, that the breath, the same we can say about the days.
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Add to this now that the governments of African governments at district level or provincial level or at the national level also pursues interests,
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their own interests that we see straight away that this whole stabilisation effort actually is wrong and fragmented.
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A lot of good things are done. But it is rather fragmented. We also see that there are different.
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Each of these countries, each of the donors, each of the organisations have their own needs for evaluation.
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And what we also see is that there are lot of different evaluation process that's going on in parallel,
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which sometimes leads to two respondents to some evaluation fatigue because
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they get very tired of responding to to everybody's different questionnaires.
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The second reason I think is is equally as strong. And that's an individual reason.
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Individuals, of course, what we see as we have the operational plan is time spent three months.
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We then have that broken down to an operational order. So a shorter term plan.
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It's that sequence is how we achieve the operational plan.
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And of course, this operate the priorities and the operational order change over time as well.
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So if you're said there is staff for six months or so, what you are actually working on is the operational order, not the operational plan.
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So the the assessment to actually tries to assess something that you don't feel is relevant to what you are doing.
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So what you do is you don't fill it in as consciously as it should.
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Either anecdotal evidence suggests that that several people who are supposed to be respondents don't even bother collecting the information,
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that they just do this. And the risk for all of all of this is.
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Well, one is that the national evaluation processes aren't particularly well established either with we risk that national or if you want short
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term tactical considerations and evaluations have more influence the long term strategic operational processes towards stabilisation.
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And if we don't have a measurement process that actually sees that what we're doing is any good.
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And equally, we could say we can see that that fragmentations risks to increase and therefore we might have less impact.
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How many I have left to something I. I was going to.
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I just did very quickly, because the second set of challenges that the the ones relating to the method,
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the logic problems are actually quite straightforward.
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The biggest one is attributing change somehow if we were all these processes to the measured change.
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They have indicated measure change. What they can say is allocating this change to a particular activity that's really difficult to do.
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First of all, the order effects is really simple to do. We dug a well, we have the well, that's that's easy to do.
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Second and third order effects. Would that often appear with a time lag or much more difficult?
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Let's say that we increase the local governments capacity because they dug the well or the government's legitimacy.
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How do you link that to the digging of the well? That's very difficult to do.
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So all these pross and none of them say that they actually do this.
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They're much more modest in being assertive about that.
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They say they achieved it, but they're still faced with no other challenges.
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The only one I want to take up here is the collection of data people. That's that's real trouble in this volatile environment.
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First of all, we have restricted access to the most geographical area.
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So it's very difficult to to to develop a good theory of change if you don't know what what you're actually trying to change.
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So that is a big problem often that those that we collect information from,
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we we might actually put them at risk as well, because if they talk to us for too long, they might get into trouble.
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Access to Femur's is very difficult. The volume of data,
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someone is not really statistically valid that we have because we can't collect enough when we rely on Afghans to pull to conduct Pullings.
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We don't know if they actually did it or just invented it. We don't know if if they did it in the area suggested.
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We don't know if they did it in the numbers it. We don't know if they're accurately recorded.
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We don't know if the sample spread as we wanted them to spread the sample.
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We don't know if those respondents answered truthfully or if they were mainly worried about how does my offer affect my private security?
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And what effect is it going to have on me that we don't capture tribal or family affiliations of interviewer interviews and so forth?
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So we see that there's a lot of problems.
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Another one is, of course, that we can just about ask somebody for 30 minutes before they get bored and stop being cooperative.
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So we can't necessarily use controlled questions either.
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So we have a dataset that isn't very good with difficulties interpreting this this data.
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But if I just jumped to the conclusion, I don't think that the difficulties we have today disqualifies the efforts to do something like this.
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I think we need some form of evaluation process where we'll work with them,
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because if we don't if we just do this and we just we don't have a clue whether what we do makes us.
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We need to have and develop these evaluation processes. There are simple solutions to improve the cooperation between different professions,
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and it has looked with terminology and just agreeing on some terminology.
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But I think the main thing is that we can do is improve the evaluation plan that we actually have right now.
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I think we have to change the mindset. And in some nations, that has to change more than others.
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From the strategic to the more long term awareness, I think we need to improve the utility of the evaluation process to those that actually are
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supposed to fulfil it and to give information because there is a detachment right now.
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And the reason there is that detachment, I think,
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is that right now the evaluation processes are adults rather than being integrated and most staff work.
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I know in some countries that they do a bit more than another.
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They they they invent these evaluation processes, ex-post and it's in an additional cell outside somewhere.
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So it's not an intrinsic part of the planning process.
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And if it were, we would actually have to do what with the military that tries to do all the time with effects based approach.
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More Maust it would achieve more stringent planning. We wouldn't think about activity, output, outcome, impact.
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How this change actually works and the ownership of this process must be pushed down.
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So the responsibility to to to collect information, do the evaluation,
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should it should be for those that that actually use it so that those that collected
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will put it down to lower levels and push it sidewards so that the people
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in the stalls that are responsible for certain errors and to conduct both the
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evaluation and produce the recommendations that we draw from this in the end.
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To optimise the use of resources available into improved intervention and to ensure public support,
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those in charge of operations need to ask themselves two sets of questions.
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The first thing is, are we doing things right? So are implementing our plans as efficiently as we can?
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Or can we improve on how we do what we're doing? And the measurement for this is often the measurements that are made,
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often called measurement of implementation, measurement of performance or measurement of efficiency.
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That's one set of measurements that I use. The other set of questions that one needs to ask yourself is, are we doing the right things?
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So is our plan actually any good?
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Do we need to change what we're doing, not just how we do it, but actually do we need to do completely different things?
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And this is what we call the measurement of effects.
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And these two evaluation process, hopefully they should be able to do if we implement them is a of course to do.
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Also, all we're doing right. Things right. But also what they they should be able to do is to increase the sophistication of our understanding and
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find to the hypothesis that we have our theory of change so that we improve the impact of what we do.
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And really important as well of all these, these measurement processes should generate some form recommendations again.
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And since they're so central for the for the success operations, one could assume that these are very well established.
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But the funny thing is they're not.
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Well, it's not so funny, actually, but but they're not it's surprising that one reason is really that it's difficult.
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And this paper addresses two sets of different difficulties. The first one is challenges that we produce ourselves.
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And how do we make life more difficult for ourselves? To improve our evaluation processes.
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And then the second set is the methodological problems that are inherent to measuring effects.
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So I look at those two and I conclude with some recommendations.
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And if we look at the challenges we set ourself how we make our own life more difficult.
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I'm going to take a step back a bit from Stuart focussed very much on on just the UK approach.
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And we have to look at a bit, step back and look at them often at multinational context as well.
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I think it's quite clear that we all know that the current operations tend to be more ambitious than previous interventions.
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We don't just try to work in war with or in conflicts.
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Bachelor types work on complex the fight to root causes and so forth. We also see that that we heard that this morning about the normative influence,
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were they the liberal peace theory that we're not really just trying to to stop symptoms, i.e. stop people from fighting, stop starvation?
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We actually want to to change the way people think. And I think that's it's quite clear that there's far more ambitious.
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We often hear this in the military context. We often hear this slogan about winning hearts and minds.
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That's not what today's operations are about at all. It's about changing hearts, mind.
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We want people to think differently. And if we want people to think differently.
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Reasonable democracy. What that, of course, means is and that's quite difficult to accept for many people is that success,
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operation's success is not something that we can determine with our own actions.
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It actually depends on the activities of the local population and how they engage in peace processes and so forth.
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But at the same time, they're not just more ambitious. These operations off of it's far more ambiguous.
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They what we actually try to achieve that peacekeeper was easy.
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Stopping people from fighting humanitarian operations are quite easy to understand what it's all about.
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But what we're trying to do is trying to fix states. And what does that mean?
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How do you do it? And this this ambiguous this is reflected in the strategic documents, which I think have a tendency,
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although they say a lot, but they have a tendency to be apple pie statements.
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You can look, for instance, at Afghanistan. They have to bring this together.
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The goal of so many actors that they could include almost anything.
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If you look at the aims are very broad that are acceptable to all,
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you can just look at what nature had difficulties in in deciding whether it's conducting counterinsurgency campaign or what it's trying to achieve.
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If we look at the Afghan National Development Strategy, it has a hundred and sixteen expected outcomes.
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It's that they don't necessarily set a realistic timeline set.
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The Afghan compact doesn't know the end even when they try.
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And the aid is fair enough to be fair. And it tries to give some direction.
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It tries to set some priorities. These priorities don't actually translate into national agendas of the contributors.
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So they they while everybody can argue that whatever they do in this example, Afghanistan complies with the strategic document,
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the A.D.s, the Afghan compact and so forth, that they actually have very, very different things.
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And that, I would argue, is is a sign of or evidence of that these strategic documents tend to be apple pie statements.
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The question is, of course, why? And the answer is very, very simple. It's because they all motivated by different motives to to intervene.
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There is a part of altruism, of course, making life better for the Afghans.
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There is the element of national security because we see a threat emerging in Afghanistan, in the region.
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There is this argument about NATO's credibility. There are arguments about bilateral relationships with the US.
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So each country, each contributor, each organisation decides on many a whole host of motives how much they're going to contribute.
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And of course, if we look at Afghanistan in the centre,
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we're going to see that we don't contribute enough to actually we're not as committed as we need to be to fix this in any short term.
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Turning it around, we can see if we look at it globally,
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that we actually overcommit resources to Afghanistan compared to the other 30 or so, the equally vulnerable states.
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Therefore. Exactly, BP will be set up of reasons. So what we're left with here, or if this is left,
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we're going to continue to have rather weak strategic direction that some people can argue that this is actually quite a good thing.
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It gives us some advantages because it's it gives us a more flexible approach.
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Bottom up approach, which you which is normally counterinsurgency context.
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There is, however, real disadvantages as well, and that is that it risks to be fragmented.
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So we don't achieve to reinforce success. And I think this is something that is really evident in regional command south in Afghanistan.
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At first glance, if we look at regional command south, everything seems to be very neatly organised.
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And one would assume that the evaluation process is really helpful as well.
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The way it's organised, what they've done is quite simple. Arguably, the the intervention is led by ISAF Regional Command SOF, the South,
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which has outlined an operational plan with a three year perspective that the current model is from 2008 to 2003.
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And they then work in four landru operations.
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And these four lines of operations over the course reflected in the strategic documents, the A.D.s and the, I think, conflict as well.
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So for security. ISAF has responsibility for capacity building of the Afghan National Security Forces.
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That is led by the U.S. that combined security transition command.
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And for the third line of operation governance and the fourth development and
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reconstruction are led by the parties and they are now merged together to two,
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governance and development to reconstruction.
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And this operational plan is quite helpful for the assessment, because what it does, it says on these line four lines of operations,
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it has identified certain decisive points over time of three years that need to be achieved some parallel,
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what needs to be achieved and what line of operations. So.
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So they have quite a good idea of how they think that is going to work and to monitor progress towards this,
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to fact figure out whether we're moving in the right direction and if we're moving as fast as we can.
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The joint effects assessment,
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so in Regional Command South has set up a evaluation to which is called the Regional Common Operations Picture after they report quarterly.
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And they base their their assessments on opinion polls and on the questionnaires that they give to the task forces.
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So the people under their command, both of the task forces and the PR team.
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So all of this seems to be very well set up. The problem is it doesn't work very well.
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Why? Well, it seems that that they're not getting the answers they need from these subordinate units.
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At least the quality and the engagement from them vary considerably over time.
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Which, of course, affects the validity of the data said they say they work on.
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So why is this? And I think there's there's again, there the two main reasons for this.
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The first is we can say it's structural.
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What we see is that contributors don't reave their own priorities from the operational plan.
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But our CSA setup, they look at national preferences, national pressures,
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and that decides what they contribute with and what they want their own forces to do or their own agency to do.
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RC South leverage to somehow make them complacent. Small as well, because, of course, they have no resources of their own.
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And if you can't allocate resources, you actually have very little impact.
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What happens? This is WhiteWave, the archtop, the evaluation tool and the operational plan.
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If Nashed net nations and agencies don't miss their comply with it,
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what it tries to measure progress against doesn't necessarily serve what these countries want to know.
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So there is that this is secure. Let me just give an example up of Canada.
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UK is another example, by the way. But I'll skip that since we talked about that a bit.
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But the Canadians have decided to withdraw in 2011, just like the Dutch in two 10 in 2010.
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And the governments, rather than saying we want to fix Afghanistan, we want to fix Kandahar, which is their priority.
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They say that's not what we'd want to do. They have to explain to the public at home why they're there.
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So they have to show that there is a progress.
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So what they've done is they set six priorities and three senators projects with very concrete and districts projects.
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These are concrete benchmarks as well. And these are not taken from the operational plan.
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So what they do is if they get questionnaires from the Arkell, it doesn't really do the trick for them.
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They don't get the measurements they need to sell their progress to to Canada.
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And guess what they do if they're very busy? Well, they might not give this process high priority.
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The same we can say, but as I said, that the breath, the same we can say about the days.
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Add to this now that the governments of African governments at district level or provincial level or at the national level also pursues interests,
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their own interests that we see straight away that this whole stabilisation effort actually is wrong and fragmented.
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A lot of good things are done. But it is rather fragmented. We also see that there are different.
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Each of these countries, each of the donors, each of the organisations have their own needs for evaluation.
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And what we also see is that there are lot of different evaluation process that's going on in parallel,
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which sometimes leads to two respondents to some evaluation fatigue because
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they get very tired of responding to to everybody's different questionnaires.
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The second reason I think is is equally as strong. And that's an individual reason.
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Individuals, of course, what we see as we have the operational plan is time spent three months.
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We then have that broken down to an operational order. So a shorter term plan.
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It's that sequence is how we achieve the operational plan.
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And of course, this operate the priorities and the operational order change over time as well.
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So if you're said there is staff for six months or so, what you are actually working on is the operational order, not the operational plan.
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So the the assessment to actually tries to assess something that you don't feel is relevant to what you are doing.
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So what you do is you don't fill it in as consciously as it should.
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Either anecdotal evidence suggests that that several people who are supposed to be respondents don't even bother collecting the information,
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that they just do this. And the risk for all of all of this is.
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Well, one is that the national evaluation processes aren't particularly well established either with we risk that national or if you want short
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term tactical considerations and evaluations have more influence the long term strategic operational processes towards stabilisation.
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And if we don't have a measurement process that actually sees that what we're doing is any good.
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And equally, we could say we can see that that fragmentations risks to increase and therefore we might have less impact.
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How many I have left to something I. I was going to.
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I just did very quickly, because the second set of challenges that the the ones relating to the method,
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the logic problems are actually quite straightforward.
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The biggest one is attributing change somehow if we were all these processes to the measured change.
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They have indicated measure change. What they can say is allocating this change to a particular activity that's really difficult to do.
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First of all, the order effects is really simple to do. We dug a well, we have the well, that's that's easy to do.
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Second and third order effects. Would that often appear with a time lag or much more difficult?
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Let's say that we increase the local governments capacity because they dug the well or the government's legitimacy.
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How do you link that to the digging of the well? That's very difficult to do.
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So all these pross and none of them say that they actually do this.
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They're much more modest in being assertive about that.
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They say they achieved it, but they're still faced with no other challenges.
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The only one I want to take up here is the collection of data people. That's that's real trouble in this volatile environment.
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First of all, we have restricted access to the most geographical area.
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So it's very difficult to to to develop a good theory of change if you don't know what what you're actually trying to change.
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So that is a big problem often that those that we collect information from,
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we we might actually put them at risk as well, because if they talk to us for too long, they might get into trouble.
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Access to Femur's is very difficult. The volume of data,
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someone is not really statistically valid that we have because we can't collect enough when we rely on Afghans to pull to conduct Pullings.
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We don't know if they actually did it or just invented it. We don't know if if they did it in the area suggested.
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We don't know if they did it in the numbers it. We don't know if they're accurately recorded.
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We don't know if the sample spread as we wanted them to spread the sample.
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We don't know if those respondents answered truthfully or if they were mainly worried about how does my offer affect my private security?
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And what effect is it going to have on me that we don't capture tribal or family affiliations of interviewer interviews and so forth?
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So we see that there's a lot of problems.
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Another one is, of course, that we can just about ask somebody for 30 minutes before they get bored and stop being cooperative.
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So we can't necessarily use controlled questions either.
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So we have a dataset that isn't very good with difficulties interpreting this this data.
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But if I just jumped to the conclusion, I don't think that the difficulties we have today disqualifies the efforts to do something like this.
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I think we need some form of evaluation process where we'll work with them,
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because if we don't if we just do this and we just we don't have a clue whether what we do makes us.
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We need to have and develop these evaluation processes. There are simple solutions to improve the cooperation between different professions,
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and it has looked with terminology and just agreeing on some terminology.
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But I think the main thing is that we can do is improve the evaluation plan that we actually have right now.
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I think we have to change the mindset. And in some nations, that has to change more than others.
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From the strategic to the more long term awareness, I think we need to improve the utility of the evaluation process to those that actually are
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supposed to fulfil it and to give information because there is a detachment right now.
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And the reason there is that detachment, I think,
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is that right now the evaluation processes are adults rather than being integrated and most staff work.
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I know in some countries that they do a bit more than another.
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They they they invent these evaluation processes, ex-post and it's in an additional cell outside somewhere.
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So it's not an intrinsic part of the planning process.
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And if it were, we would actually have to do what with the military that tries to do all the time with effects based approach.
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More Maust it would achieve more stringent planning. We wouldn't think about activity, output, outcome, impact.
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How this change actually works and the ownership of this process must be pushed down.
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So the responsibility to to to collect information, do the evaluation,
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should it should be for those that that actually use it so that those that collected
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will put it down to lower levels and push it sidewards so that the people
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in the stalls that are responsible for certain errors and to conduct both the
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evaluation and produce the recommendations that we draw from this in the end.
