The Moral Foundations of Impact Evaluation

Heath Henderson

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 2022, vol. 23, issue 3, 425-454

Abstract: Impact evaluation has become increasingly central to evidence-based social policy, particularly in the field of international development. While the act of evaluation requires numerous ethical decisions (e.g. regarding the problems to investigate, the tools of investigation, and the interpretation of results), the normative framework for such decisions is generally implicit, undermining our ability to fully scrutinise the evidence base. I argue that the moral foundation of impact evaluation is best viewed as utilitarian in the sense that it meets the three elementary requirements of utilitarianism: welfarism, sum-ranking, and consequentialism. I further argue that the utilitarian approach is subject to a number of important limitations, including distributional indifference, the neglect of non-utility concerns, and an orientation toward subjective states. In light of these issues, I outline an alternative framework for impact evaluation that has its moral basis in the capabilities approach. I argue that capabilitarian impact evaluation not only addresses many of the issues associated with utilitarian methods, but can also be viewed as a more general approach to impact evaluation.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19452829.2021.2014424 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jhudca:v:23:y:2022:i:3:p:425-454

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CJHD20

DOI: 10.1080/19452829.2021.2014424

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities is currently edited by Kathryn Rosenblum

More articles in Journal of Human Development and Capabilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().