Evaluation in Transition: The Promise and Challenge of South-South Cooperation

Abstract

In order for the evaluation field to ensure its salience over the next decade, high-profile areas of work have to be sought where evaluative practices are underexplored or undervalued yet can help inspire and accelerate urgently needed transformations while also advancing evaluation theory and practice. This article highlights one such opportunity, offered by South-South cooperation (SSC), an increasingly powerful force in international development yet overshadowed by the frameworks, narratives, and approaches of North-South cooperation (NSC), better known as international development cooperation or development aid. The values, principles, achievements, and challenges that define SSC are seldom discussed at evaluation events or in the evaluation literature, and development evaluation continues to be shaped largely by theories from the Global North and by North-South interactions, despite the growing prominence of SSC and the Global South in world affairs. This article is dedicated to creating awareness of the current situation by highlighting how more intensive engagement with the unique aspects and underexplored opportunities of SSC might help shift paradigms and practices in evaluation, especially but not only in the Global South.