Hollow by Design: Why Evaluation Systems Decouple in the MENA Region.

Abstract

Institutional theory predicts that formal governance structures often develop without corresponding operational substance, a phenomenon variously described as decoupling or isomorphic mimicry. The evaluation governance literature has acknowledged this possibility but has not subjected it to rigorous set-theoretic analysis. The present study applies fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to data from 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa to examine which institutional conditions are necessary and which are sufficient for substantive evaluation practice. Four conditions drawn from an established three-system framework of evaluation institutionalisation are tested: political institutionalisation, political use, social system development, and professionalisation. Political institutionalisation meets the necessity threshold for substantive practice but falls well short of sufficiency, confirming the structural decoupling. Professionalisation exhibits near-zero correlation with substantive practice, a result that challenges prevailing assumptions in evaluation capacity development about the catalytic role of professional infrastructure. The article introduces the concept of professional hollowness to characterise settings in which the formal apparatus of a profession develops without generating corresponding practice. No single condition and no two-condition conjunction reaches the sufficiency threshold for substantive practice, a finding consistent with the configurational premise that genuine evaluation institutionalisation is irreducible to any single dimension. Findings are robust to a purified-conditions robustness specification reported in the supplementary materials. Implications for institutional theory, evaluation policy, and the design of evaluation capacity development interventions are discussed.