Everything, everywhere, all at once? Donor bureaucrats struggle with four dimensions of development effectiveness

• Donor bureaucrats are central actors in aid as they allocate, supervise and evaluate development interventions globally. • We analyse qualitative data from 89 randomly sampled interviews in bilateral agencies in Germany, Norway and South Korea. • We find that donor bureaucrats struggle with translating policies and interventions into four effectiveness dimensions. • All dimensions are conditioned by explicitly political logics, limiting the potential of evidence-based policy-making. • Conceptual complexity and political demands render development effectiveness a means and not an end for donor bureaucrats. Our research asks how 89 randomly selected development bureaucrats in three OECD member states—Germany, Norway and South Korea—pursue the amorphous concept of development effectiveness. Amid declining adherence to global norms and a booming evidence industry, our analysis demonstrates the analytical value of distinguishing scales and modes of development effectiveness. In each of the resulting four dimensions, bureaucrats’ pursuit of development effectiveness is conditioned by two primary considerations: how to satisfy their political principals, and how to sway public opinion. The implications are threefold. First, the four dimensions cannot be integrated into one coherent concept. Second, a scalar shift in political attention towards domestic audiences leads donor bureaucrats to regard global policy processes and macro-level impacts as rhetorical devices rather than as substantive reference points. Third, as a result of this dynamic, the purported embrace of evidence-based policy-making primarily constitutes a risk management approach to safeguard national budget allocations through public legitimation. Overall, our findings therefore caution against optimism about an imminent evidence revolution, as donor bureaucracies have entered yet another era of national interest-driven development politics.