Monitoring, reviewing, and evaluating the quality and relevance of the research done by the Future Harvest Centers was an important part of TAC’s and the inter­im Science Council’s responsibilities. Independent assessments are important to promote accountability and trans­parency and they will continue to play an important role in the work of the Science Council. However, we are proposing sig­nificant changes in the way they are undertaken to deal with the shortcom­ings in the present system. These short­comings include the following:

First, while External Program and Management Reviews (EPMRs) of individual Centers have been very useful, they have taken too long, cost too much, and they have been done too infrequently. It is not uncommon that an EPMR would take two years from the time the Center begins its preparations until the results of the EPMR are considered by the CGIAR. This is very disruptive for the Center’s work and can have a negative effect on the Center’s research output. Although the past rule was that an EPMR would be undertaken every five years (in fact the EPMRs used to be called “quinquennial reviews”), recent practice has been to do them every 6–7 years. This is not frequent enough to fol­low a Center’s development and detect potential problems in a timely manner.

Second, there has been little monitoring of action taken or not taken by Centers to implement recommendations by the EPMRs. Typically the Center makes a response to the recommendations and is only asked to report on the action taken, in preparation for the next EPMR several years later.

Fourth, since the Board of Trustees is fully responsible for a Center’s performance, it should take a greater responsibility for the assessment of the relevance and quality of the research done by the center. This is not something the board can simply delegate to the EPMR and the Science Council. Only if Center boards and managements and the Science Council work together, will we assure the research relevance and quality we all want.

Fifth, the Science Council is in the process of strengthening the Center Medium-Term Plans (MTPs), the related logframe project descriptions, and the performance measurement approach to better monitor performance and relevance of the completed and proposed research within the context of the new system priorities. One of the changes in the way the Science Council handles MTPs is that we are more specific and forthright (constructively critical) about problems and suggestions for change. I hope future EPMR teams will adopt the same approach in the reports so that the reader does not have to read between the lines to get the message. Confusing politeness with deliberate fuzziness is not helpful.

Taking these factors into account, the Science Council is proposing that more emphasis be placed on self-assessment by the boards and managements of the Centers through:

• Board-endorsed MTPs and logframe project descriptions that clearly identify goals, timelines, output targets, and relationship to system priorities
• Annual reporting of Center self-assessments and accomplishments relative to output targets
• Reporting of action taken in response to EPMR recommendations, and
• Board-commissioned external reviews that would follow guidelines developed by the Science Council to assist Center management and governance and to provide more useful input into future EPMRs.

Every five years the Science Council would commission an EPMR jointly organized by the Science Council and the CGIAR Secretariat. The EPMR would be based primarily on the results of the Center’s self-assessment and the Board-commissioned external reviews with regard to the assessment processes followed, the quality and relevance of the science undertaken by the Center, its contributions to the achievement of the goals of the system priority research, and selected governance and management aspects. By building on results from high-quality self-assessments and CCERs that meet certain standards for credibility, such EPMRs would be more strategic, take less time and be less disruptive for the Centers, while providing the kind of strategic advice needed by donors, Centers, and other stakeholders of the CGIAR.

I hope that by strengthening the monitoring and evaluation process, individual donors and other stakeholders will have less of a need to do their own assessments of Centers and projects. A more cohesive approach with fewer ad hoc evaluations will lead to savings in staff time and financial resources, which, together with higher quality and more relevant research, can be converted into more and better research for the benefit of poor people.

Per Pinstrup-Andersen