II. WHAT DOES THE RATING SYSTEM ENTAIL? The country programme performance rating uses five internationally agreed evaluation criteria, established by OECD to support consistent, high-quality evaluation, namely: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability. These criteria provide a normative framework to determine the merit or value of a programme intervention (policy, strategy, programme, project or activity). They serve as the basis upon which evaluative judgements are made. Coherence is a new criterion that was introduced by the OECD Development Assistance Committee in the revised set of criteria, to enable evaluations to understand the role of an intervention within a particular system (organisation, sector, thematic area, country), as opposed to taking an exclusive, interventionor institution-centric perspective. The rating system gives special consideration to internal and external coherence. See section VI for an elaboration of the evaluation criteria. For each of the criteria, a set of sub-criteria, corresponding indicators (with variables for data coding), and sources of data are defined (See Annex 1 Tables A and B). The metric used to quantify the programme performance variables is a four-point scale. Four points are used to force an evaluative measurement and discourage the choice of a safe, neutral metric. The rating system parameters and indicators are used in conjunction with the ICPE evaluation matrix, which details additional questions for assessing UNDP contributions to development results. The precision of metric judgements will be continuously monitored and strengthened. A set of guiding questions is provided for each indicator, to promote uniformity across evaluations. While the indicators remain constant, the guiding questions can be adapted to customize wordings and reflect programme specificities and context.
COUNTRY PROGRAMME PERFORMANCE RATING SYSTEM MANUAL
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