What changed
Value for money (VfM) moved from a donor compliance box toward an evaluative discipline. DFID's 3Es (economy, efficiency, effectiveness) grew into 4Es with equity and carried over into FCDO. The pivotal contribution is Julian King's Value for Investment approach, which combines evaluative rubrics with economic methods so that VfM becomes a reasoned judgement about how well resources are used, not a single ratio.
It builds on Jane Davidson's evaluative reasoning and the Aotearoa New Zealand rubrics school (King, McKegg, Oakden and Wehipeihana), which argue that explicit rubrics surface values and improve the credibility of evaluative conclusions.
In a separate lineage, the effective-altruism and RCT ecosystem revived cost-effectiveness analysis: GiveWell's transparent models with explicit "moral weights", J-PAL's cost-effectiveness and marginal-value-of-public-funds work, and CEGA's costing community of practice pushing evaluators to collect cost data alongside impact data.
In public finance, spending reviews became the OECD's flagship instrument for informed budgeting, with Slovakia's Value for Money Unit at the Ministry of Finance (Útvar hodnoty za peniaze, 2016) a prominent Central European case. Social Return on Investment (SROI), meanwhile, attracted sustained academic criticism.
Frameworks and tools
- Evaluative rubrics
- Value for Investment (VfI)
- the 4Es
- cost-effectiveness analysis
- marginal value of public funds
- spending reviews
- SROI and the Social Value International standards
- ICAI's value-for-money reviews
Vocabulary to recognise
- Evaluative reasoning
- rubric
- VfM/VfI
- 4Es
- cost-effectiveness
- moral weights
- MVPF
- spending review
- "hodnota za peniaze"
- SROI ratio
- proportionality
Live controversies
Monetising what resists monetisation; false precision in cost-effectiveness ratios (GiveWell itself publishes caveats about the imprecision of its estimates); the equity-versus-efficiency tension inside the 4Es; whether spending reviews are fiscal-consolidation tools in disguise; the arbitrariness of financial proxies in SROI and the temptation to game the ratio; and the technocratic capture of "value" by finance ministries and economists at the expense of participatory valuation.
Further reading
- Julian King, Using Economic Methods Evaluatively, American Journal of Evaluation, 2017; John Gargani and Julian King, Principles and methods to advance value for money, Evaluation, 2024.
- BetterEvaluation, Value for Investment; Julian King, Value for Investment resources.
- E. Jane Davidson, Evaluative Reasoning, UNICEF Innocenti Methodological Brief no. 4, 2014.
- Julian King, Kate McKegg, Judy Oakden and Nan Wehipeihana, Rubrics: A Method for Surfacing Values and Improving the Credibility of Evaluation, Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 2013.
- ICAI, DFID's approach to value for money in programme and portfolio management, 2018; Ed Laws and Craig Valters, Value for money and adaptive programming, ODI Working Paper 572, 2021.
- Catherine Hollander, How GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses, GiveWell blog, 2017; J-PAL, Cost-Effectiveness and Welfare Analysis; CEGA, Costing Community of Practice.
- Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic, Value for Money unit and Ten Milestones That Shaped Value for Money, 2026; OECD, Best Practices for Spending Reviews, 2023; IMF PFM Blog, Ten Lessons from Spending Reviews in Eastern Europe, 2018.
- Brian Yates and Mita Marra, Social Return On Investment (SROI): Problems, solutions … and is SROI a good investment?, Evaluation and Program Planning, 2017; Florentine Maier et al., SROI as a Method for Evaluation Research: Understanding Merits and Limitations, Voluntas, 2015.