2021 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 127-140
The purpose of this paper is to comprehend how evaluation practices have been managed and controlled by administrative organizations from the perspectives of public administration. This paper focuses on the evaluation policy and considers the administrative processes of the ODA evaluation. Evaluation policies share ideas about evaluation and enable the organizations to evaluate systematically and coherently. The author traced the historical changes of Japan’s ODA Evaluation Guidelines, which have been updated 12 times from 2003 to 2020. As a result, this research reveals that the guidelines have been modified incrementally to adapt and coordinate internal and external conditions, such as organizational arrangements, changes of policies and programs, international trends or movements, and interactions between scholars and practitioners. In addition, the accumulation of minor changes is treated as precedents and yields both improvements and deteriorations of the practices. Consequently, the guidelines tend to be misused as manuals and confuse the evaluation practices.
