General considerations and user experiences of project cycle management in a small donor-transitional country context

Abstract

Promoted by the EC in 1993, project cycle management (PCM) helps project planning, managment and evaluation. This article analyses a feasibility and planning exercise for a specific project between a small donor country and a transitional, developing country. It focuses on generic questions about PCM, based on the hypotheses: PCM should be applied flexibly; it tends to exert unintended conditions on its use; new professionals may get carried away by it, while users coming from other methods may have to ‘unlearn’; it can be used with varying intensities and degrees of teamwork; its strengths include its hierarchical structure, its explicit inclusion of preconditions and assumptions, and its iterative structure. © 1999 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.