Assumptions

allowing use, and conditions. The lines of evidence included interviews and workshops with members and staff, surveys with MOPAN users in the national administration, ILs, and MOFPs, national documentation (the websites of each country’s MoFA and parliament were examined) and the case studies.

• make it possible to specify how MOPAN members’ administrations use MOPAN products. The caveat is that, in practice, the case studies focused on Contribution Claim 4 (CC4) (use in strategy of influence), leaving other uses and countries that do not have strategic uses mostly outside the scope.

Answering the relevance question

Relevance issues were identified during the initial phase of the evaluation. Two methods were used to answer the question: • Developing a ToC that clarifies and challenges the assumptions about the problems faced by members and MOs regarding their accountability relationship. • Interviews aiming to further challenge the assumptions about problems and solutions and to better understand the evolution of the issues faced by the multilateral system and by member countries, and to look at MOPAN’s role in this context.

Answering the efficiency question

The answer to the efficiency question has two major components.

The first is the description of the changes at MOPAN between 2015 and 2021. This is based mainly on the internal documentation, especially the minutes of the steering committees and other governance events. Given the sheer amount of documentation involved, we followed an issue-based approach to document specific changes and trends.

The issues were identified in interviews especially with staff and long-time members. The results of this analysis are presented in the appendix p.114.

The second concerns the cost of MOPAN assessments. It is always difficult to identify the full cost of an assessment. The assumptions underlying the analysis are laid out below.

Rather than choosing a preferred procedure, we opted for different calculation methods to gain insights into the evolution of costs at MOPAN.

Assumptions

Main assumptions for approach 1 (global headings)

From the interviews, we take as a premise that the actual work on assessments and other products represents approximately 80% of MOPAN’s budget. Taking the 2019 budgetary year (the last “normal” year before the COVID-19 crisis), we apply this 80% rate to: “Staff cost”, “Mission & Travel”, “Operating expenses”, “Other intellectual services”. The output is the annual cost for work on assessments. To get a coherent denominator (X assessments per year), we estimate that MOPAN works on “full-assessments equivalents”, a synthetic figure representing the flow of assessments the network must address in a working year.