La evaluación de impactos para la mejora de los programas de desarrollo rural. Aplicación del enfoque de sistemas en comunidades de productores de maíz en Puebla (México)
- Autores: Pablo Vidueira
- Directores de la Tesis: José María Díaz Puente (dir. tes.), Susana Martín Fernández (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ( España ) en 2016
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Jorge Jordana Butticaz de Pozas (presid.), David Pereira Jerez (secret.), Marta Galiano Sevilla (voc.), Pablo Resco Sánchez (voc.), Ana María García Femenía (voc.)
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- Resumen
Evaluation is a young discipline that has experienced and is experiencing a high expansion process yet. This Ph.D. Thesis ―in its first paper― deals with the expansion of the evaluation field. This expansion is approached through its increasing use in the international organizations and policies of different geographical areas; and through the enormous growth of professional associations dedicated to the evaluation worldwide. This expansion is due to several contributions. Particularly in the development field, it is very relevant the ability of evaluation to provide evidence to support the improvement of interventions; as well as its capacity to offer explicit criteria and standards by which to judge the interventions.
These contributions of the evaluation field must be added to the contribution of one of the leading parts in any evaluation of an intervention: the impact evaluation, which is described by many authors as one of the most important parts of the evaluation; one of the most demanding and on which there are more needs for research and improvement.
This Ph.D. Thesis aims to contribute to the development of the evaluation field, and more specifically to the development of the impact evaluation. To do this, once the international expansion of the evaluation field was analysed ―in the first paper―, we moved to analyse the state of the impact evaluation internationally ―in papers 2 and 3― with the aim of finding recommendations that allow to improve this part of the evaluation practice.
For this, the rural development programs of the European Union were selected as a relevant case study to the analysis of the impact evaluation internationally. Such relevance is supported by the sustained growth of the evaluation culture within the European institutions since the 90s, and by the appropriateness of the rural development programmes within the European policy. The European rural development policy was implemented in the 2007-2013 period through 88 programmes which took 10% of the total EU budget. Each of these 88 programmes underwent three evaluations with their corresponding impact evaluations.
Results derived from the research conducted on the impact assessment of the ex ante and mid-term evaluations of the European rural development programmes ―papers 2 and 3― show the existing decoupling between the expectations of the European Commission from the impact assessment, and what the evaluators can do given the context in which the evaluation activities must develop. The main limitations relate to the inability of those methodologies recommended by the Commission to respond to the complexity of estimating the impacts generated by the rural development programs, and also the lack of sufficient and relevant information.
The last research of this Ph.D. Thesis deals with the application of one specific tool ―system dynamics― for the impact assessment, especially about programmes aiming the development of any territory. The system dynamics models belong to the systems approach. These models allow analysing trends of the relevant variables under different programme settings and scenarios. In this research, a new methodology is proposed to apply the system dynamics modelling ―which stands for a quantitative approach― by bringing another methodology ―which is qualitative― and is able to incorporate the different perspectives existing about the programme as well as the cultural aspects whose effects on the impacts of any development programs has already been extensively studied. Bringing the Soft Systems Methodology ―which also belongs to the systems approach― allows getting models that are closer to reality, and whose explanatory power on the effects of programme models is greater.
