Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) or the Highway? An Alternative Road to Investigating the Value for Money of International Development Research.

Research for development (R4D) funding is increasingly expected to demonstrate value for money (VfM). However, the dominance of positivist approaches to evaluating VfM, such as cost-benefit analysis, do not fully account for the complexity of R4D funds and risk undermining efforts to contribute to transformational development. This paper posits an alternative approach to evaluating VfM, using the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund and the Newton Fund as case studies. Based on a constructivist approach to valuing outcomes, this approach applies a collaboratively developed rubric-based peer review to a sample of projects. This is more appropriate for the complexity of R4D interventions, particularly when considering uncertain and emergent outcomes over a long timeframe. This approach could be adapted to other complex interventions, demonstrating that our options are not merely "CBA or the highway" and there are indeed alternative routes to evaluating VfM.
Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41287-022-00565-7.
Competing Interests: Conflict of interestI am reporting that I was previously an employee of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), sponsored by BEIS; the work reported in this article was conducted while I was an employee of UKRI. I am no longer a UKRI employee and do not have a financial interest in publishing this paper.
(© European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)