Can evaluation serve accountability and learning equally?

Evidence and context

“Accountability and learning” sounds like a single objective until a team has to decide which questions an evaluation will answer, who will read it and what happens afterwards.

Reinertsen, Bjørkdahl and McNeill examine aid evaluation processes, reports and systems using empirical material from Sweden and Norway. Their 2022 article describes practical trade-offs between accountability and learning, including a tendency for accountability to take priority even when learning is an explicit aim. Reinertsen et al., 2022, Evaluation

This study is not a test of a documentation product. Its findings should not become a claim that every evaluation fails to generate learning. They point to institutional choices about purpose, process and use that better storage alone cannot settle.

An archive can make evidence easier to inspect. The organisation still needs time, responsibility and permission to act on uncomfortable findings. A product that hides disagreement behind a polished narrative could make that task harder.

Before commissioning a report, identify one accountability question and one learning decision. Ask whether the same evidence, timing and audience can serve both. Keep any trade-off visible rather than assuming that a completed report will automatically meet both purposes.

Implications for research and practice

Accountability and learning can create different incentives for evaluation. Their balance needs deliberate governance rather than an assumption that one report serves both equally.

Scope and limitations

This is a selective narrative brief based on the linked publications, not a systematic review or a new empirical study. Illustrative scenarios and practice implications are editorial analysis. Findings should be interpreted within the settings, methods and observation periods of their original sources.