3

This paper considers the optimal use of indicators-based management in development. Situated within the conference’s focus on evaluation and its “discontents”, the premise is that the development community’s failure to learn is not a failure of evaluation or measurement more broadly, but instead a failure of strategic clarity. I provide a brief and necessarily cursory analysis of the logical framework approach, the experience of results-based management in development, relevant critiques of the Millennium Development Goals and a recent book about measuring performance in business. All of these stories point to the same lesson – that indicators are only helpful measurement tools if they reflect an underlying strategy to produce development results. Indicators that are “strategy independent” – in David Apgar’s words – are irrelevant. I propose that the real challenge to the development community’s ability to learn from practice is not in measurement per se (in this case, the use of indicator tracking), but in the rarity of our strategic clarity.