The idea of results-based programming and focusing on outcomes rather than inputs and outputs came to the Government of Canada more widely I think in the early nineties. I think it came from the United States. It was one of the first initiatives of the Clinton administration in the United States: let's talk about what the impact is of our work, not the inputs; let's evaluate the results.
I said that this has become a kind of tyranny, because everybody who is putting forward a project proposal has to be able to say what the results will be in advance and then is going to be held accountable for the results, when in fact, as I said before, often we don't know. There are so many things that happen between the time a project begins—or between the time when an intervention in general begins—and when it ends that you can't predict what the results are going to be. Often the results are unintended. Often the results can't actually be attributed to what you're doing.
Social development is very complicated. It takes time. Let me just give you an example of the problem. If you're going to have a program to improve education in the school system.... Let's say you decide that the project is going to be improved teachers, that you're going to do a teacher training project. The input is a teacher training project; the output is trained teachers. In the old days, what we would have evaluated was how good the training program was: what did they learn? If you were thinking more about outcomes, you might actually measure whether or not the teachers are applying what they've learned in the school. If you're thinking about long-term results, it's all about the children. It isn't about the teachers or the project; it's about the children.
How would you measure the impact of your teacher training program on children, and how soon could you measure it? You obviously couldn't measure it within the life of the project. The project might have been for one year, and you might not be able to measure it for two or three years, and there would be other things that would impinge on it.
One of the problems is that in our need to get results we've actually forgotten about those kinds of results and focusing back again on the outputs and short-term outcomes of a particular project.
Development is experimental. This development business that we've been in for 40 or 50 years remains an experiment. What we have to do is learn from what works, and we have to make sure that we learn from what doesn't work—as I say, not cover up the mistakes, but learn from them. The fear of making mistakes, the aversion to risk, the fear that there's going to be an announcement that the Auditor General has discovered some failure, has made a lot of people, including CIDA and many NGOs, very risk-averse, in a business that is full of risk.