“AUTONOMOUS” EVALUATION AGENCIES IN MEXICO ¿AUTONOMY OR INDEPENDENCE?

Abstract

The Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) systems of public programs at the local and central level in the Mexican government operate within centralized, decentralized, or autonomous agencies. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to examine whether the level of autonomy or governmental control of autonomous evaluation agencies (OCA) known as Inevap, Evalúa CDMX y Coneval, through a descriptive analysis and multidimensional view of managerial, policy, structural, financial, legal, and interventional autonomy. The analysis concludes that none of these agencies are recognized as autonomous. It also discusses the lack of accountability, performance evaluations, citizen participation, legitimacy and appointment of agency head and board members of these OCA, the relevance to evaluate the Legislative and Judicial branches, another autonomous agency, and municipalities, as well as to compare autonomy versus independence of these M&E systems. Finally, while the creation of autonomous agencies aims to performance highly specialized and technical functions such as evaluation policy, which is the exclusive competence of the State, the mere existence of M&E systems within the Executive branch is contradictory to the State’s constitutional system and the design of “autonomous” evaluation agencies.