to improve the performance of government decision making and of government services and programs, including the use of M&E for evidence-based policy making, budgeting, management, and accountability. There are many different types of M&E tools and approaches, each with advantages and limitations. This chapter presents four examples of successful government systems for M&E—in both developed and developing countries—and discusses some of their hard-earned lessons for building M&E systems. These lessons are evidence of what works and what does not in the development and sustainment of successful M&E systems. Bertha Briceño in Chapter 3 characterizes various types of M&E systems, including examples from three government-based systems in Latin America: Mexico, Colombia, and Chile. The characterization outlined here ranges from completely independent outside bodies, to strongly centralized government systems, to highly decentralized systems. Each type of system has different advantages that result from the interplay of demand and supply forces: on the supply side, actors produce M&E information for a variety of intended purposes; the demand side responds with actual utilization, revealing the real incentives of the system’s clients. In addition, strategies are presented to mitigate potential disadvantages of the different types of systems. M&E systems are frequently designed and implemented based on an initial diagnostic study. Geoffrey Shepherd in Chapter 4 discusses the core issues of how to think about such a diagnosis. There is no one blueprint for preparing an M&E diagnosis: content and presentation depend on the specific context. The chapter illustrates the range of contexts by discussing a number of issues that help explain the differences and illuminates these issues, where possible, by referring to various country studies that have appeared in recent years. They cover six Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries—mostly studies that draw “good practice” lessons—and two African and four Latin American countries—a mix of diagnostic and “lessons-of-experience” studies. Implementing M&E systems is a challenging process. Harry Hatry in Chapter 5 identifies the key steps in designing and implementing an M&E system for ministries and individual government agencies that provide services. These suggestions are intended to apply irrespective of sector. The system might have been ordered or requested by the president or prime minister’s office, by a minister, or by any agency head. The design of an M&E system should focus on creating a process that will yield regular outcome data, in addition to data on the organization’s outputs that can be used by the designing agency and upper-level officials. Philipp Krause in Chapter 6 introduces the main issues surrounding M&E as a tool for budgeting—a system usually referred to as performance Introduction
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