Since first defined in 1991, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) evaluation criteria has been one of the most widely recognized and applied criteria for international development evaluation. While the DAC evaluation criteria is believed to have significantly contributed to improving the quality of international development evaluations, there has been increasing criticism and demands to revise the criteria so that they can better respond to the rapidly changing development environment and the core values of the Global Agenda for 2030 and sustainable development goals. Following a wide-ranging consultation with various stakeholders and public survey, the OECD DAC published the revised evaluation criteria in late 2019. 

One of the defining features of development cooperation in South Korea is a proliferation of government ministries and agencies newly engaging in aid with relatively limited expertise and experience in development evaluation. As the officers from the newly engaging ministries and agencies function as evaluation commissioner, manager and internal evaluator, it is crucial for them to have a clear understanding of the revised OECD DAC evaluation criteria. In this context, the study aims to analyze key changes in the revised OECD DAC evaluation criteria from the previous version and to help Korean evaluators and commissioners to understand the purpose, background and intended use of the revised criteria, and to adapt the criteria to their evaluation while reflecting the institutional context of South Korea’s development evaluation. The study highlights specific aspects under each criterion that Korean evaluators and commissioners should pay special attention to, making considerations for Korea’s aid management system, instruments and policy environment.

For the relevance criterion, it was emphasized that in the context of South Korea, commissioners and evaluators need to pay particular attention to evaluate whether their selection of aid modalities and partner agency was appropriate. Another point stressed was that transparency and accountability in aid procurement processes should be evaluated within the relevance criterion. In times of multiple global crisis the DAC criteria encourage to assess the extent of adaptive planning and risk management. Nevertheless, the authors argue that the aid identification and budgetary process in South Korea does not allow for adaptive management. For the newly introduced coherence criterion, it was emphasized that each ministry and public agency need to assess whether their intervention is coherent with the interventions implemented by other Korean actors, not to mention external actors in the given country, region and sector. Synergies across different aid instruments and financial channels, e.g., grant and concessional loan, must be evaluated. For the effectiveness criterion, while the revised DAC criteria advise to consider inclusiveness and equity of results across different beneficiary groups, many Korean agencies lack the expertise and resources to take an inclusive approach in intervention design, implementation and results management. 

The study provides the following policy recommendations to improve Korea’s aid evaluation system. Firstly, the Korean government needs to simplify the approval process and move away from the project-based annual budget allocation system towards sector, region and program-based multi-year budgeting. Currently, the Committee for International Development Cooperation (CIDC) of the Korean government requires all government ministries and agencies to identify development interventions two years before the project commences, and to approve the project design and budget one year before intervention starts. Budget is approved and allocated based on the project, involving a range of decision makers such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Prime Minister’s Office, the Budget office under the Ministry of Economic and Finance and the National Assembly. The complicated and lengthy project-based approval process is too restrictive to allow agencies and ministries to readjust their interventions when needs arise. The current system for project identification was originally introduced to allow sufficient time to ensure coherence between policy and programming and across agencies. But it now poses challenges to adjust the intervention to changing circumstances and unexpected events such as global pandemic, conflicts and climate-induced disasters. Secondly, the Korean government should create an enabling environment to plan, collect, monitor and track the disaggregated data for different beneficiary groups by providing guidelines and resources. Ministries and agencies need to plan ahead to monitor and evaluate differential results across various target groups. Lastly, evaluation should be planned and conducted in ways that facilitate the utilization of the findings to inform policy decisions, improve programming and strengthen institutional learning. The study concludes by arguing there should be more strategic evaluations to assess long-term, higher-level transformative impacts of Korea’s development co-operations.