Agreed. Maintaining continuity in the course of TA implementation by utilizing the consultant team most familiar with the project can result in benefits from knowledge building. Furthermore, knowledge sharing initiatives provide a mechanism to facilitate information exchange that can result in successful project outcomes.
Utilization of the same consultant team in supporting processing of a number of maritime projects enabled an efficient means of transferring knowledge on common challenges, such as incorporation of best practices on climate change and disaster resilience into project design. The TA facilitated policy dialogue amongst the DMCs, leading to development of several projects that were incorporated in the respective country partnership strategies.
The validation agrees with the lesson that alignment of TA project design with ADB operational priorities and workplans can help ensure smoother implementation, monitoring, and reporting.
The TA design that is fully aligned with the operational plan priorities and structure, as well as the thematic group workplan, has made the TA implementation and monitoring smooth, as this can be done in conjunction with the overall operational plan monitoring and reporting.
The TCR could also have augmented its analysis in addition to listing the titles of the consultants’ reports. For a policy and advisory TA with the target of developing policy analysis for government agencies’ reference and consideration the TA’s findings and policy recommendations should offer inspiring perspectives and insights that are addition to what, in the absence of the TA, would have been available to and well known by the targeted audience. To this end, the TCR should have adequately discussed the reports’ contents and quality.
A lesson could be identified here: The outcome indicator(s) of a policy and advisory TA shall be deliberately designed to establish a reasonable cause–effect relationship between outputs and outcome, and, therefore,ensure a logical appropriateness and continuum of the DMF results chain. It isimportant that the outcome indicator(s) reflect the immediate and direct benefits of application of TA outputs, rather than aim to address a high-level development issue, which would bedisproportionately ambitious and complex for a TA.
Agree. However, such alignment was a necessary, but insufficient prerequisite to developing relevant and useful knowledge products and policy recommendations. The TCR could have more thoroughly discussed the TA design, with particular attention to the DMF results chain (refer to Relevance section for details). It could also have further discussed on the unattained ambitious outcome performance indicators from the perspective of DMF design.
Broad alignment of the TA support with key reform areas contributed to the relevance of TA design.
This lesson seems to suggest that the sequential order of activities could have been replaced by topic_x005F_x0002_based outputs. IED finds that the clear sequential order of activities would have given this TA more strength of TA design and planning.
Outputs could have been better streamlined as some components were overlapping. For example, outputs 1, 2, and 4 were discussing international practices and the three PPP type of funds, i.e., VGFs, lending facilities, and guarantee funds, and its applicability to PRC conditions. It is unclear whether different types were proposed for use by different levels of government. The original aim was to promote standardized application of a PPP model.