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The Evaluation Cooperation Group was set up in 1995 by the heads of evaluation in multilateral development banks to strengthen cooperation among evaluators and promote harmonization of evaluation approaches. It usually meets twice a year: participation is voluntary, and decisions are consensual. The Chair is filled by annual rotation among the members.

The group includes the African Development Bank, ADB, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank Group.

The United Nations Evaluation Group and the Development Assistance Committee Working Group on Evaluation became permanent observers in 2001. They were joined in 2008 by three new observers and prospective members: the Council of Europe Development Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the Islamic Development Bank.

At the 1997 Hong Kong meet, the presidents of the MDBs endorsed intensification of collaboration. They also agreed that dialogue should be extended to country evaluations, non-lending services, and evaluation of private sector operations.

Efforts to harmonize at the project level led to good practice standards for evaluation of private sector investment operations (2001), MDB-supported public sector operations (2002), policy-based lending by MDBs (2004), and country strategies and programs (2008).

To promote evaluation capacity development, group members have participated in the International Program for Development Evaluation Training, provided MDB-to-MDB support to transfer evaluation skills and facilitate harmonization, and contributed to building evaluation capacity.

The 2008 Tunis meet was a landmark. It confirmed that the process of developing a comprehensive and coherent suite of evaluation good practice standards is nearing completion. Members agreed to increase membership, committed to a greater number of working groups (with wider participation), and decided to increase efforts to identify and carry out joint evaluations.

The appointment in 2007 of a part-time secretariat and the revamp of the ECGNet, the group's communication platform, have swelled pre-meeting communications and encouraged a higher public relations profile. In Tunis, the group took steps to increase its visibility and contribution to the wider evaluation and development community, and agreed to be more opportunistic in communicating an ECG view on topical issues.

Next steps include revising the standards for public sector evaluations, investigating "bottom-up" approaches to developing rating scales and criteria, and conducting further work on the standards for technical assistance evaluations. Further benchmarking exercises will commence in 2009. Moreover, the group is set to develop standards for assessing the organizational and behavioral independence of the evaluation function.

Later, the group will consider the evaluation of private sector operations: their environmental and social effects and the integrity and use of data in the common performance assessment system. In addition, the African Development Bank is expected to be the first member to commit to a review of its evaluation function following an ECG-approved framework.

Still, there are limits to enhanced harmonization because of differences in the role and mandate of each member. Also, harmonization for result comparability is affected by those obtained at the self-evaluation stage in each MDB. This calls for more harmonization at the level of self-evaluation, and of operational activities more widely.

Further, the involvement of the ECG in evaluation capacity development carries potential conflict of interest. Its evaluation units have great interest and experience in fostering evaluation capacity in member countries. But independent evaluation offices can only play a catalytic role as these activities are handled principally by operational departments.