ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the history of development evaluation and speculate on its future directions. It discusses the evolving role of economics since it has proven to be the most influential among the disciplines that have shaped development policy and practice. The chapter focuses on the World Bank since it is the agency where many of the methods and practices that characterize development evaluation today have originated. The range of issues that development evaluators have had to tackle has proved vast. By now the instruments of development evaluation have demonstrated their relevance to real life problems in a wide range of countries and sectors of activity. Development evaluation has become a mature professional endeavor. It has attracted a lot of adherents and achieved substantial recognition within the international evaluation community. During the eighties and nineties the development evaluation community concluded that national policies in poor countries exert a crucial impact on aid outcomes.
