CECAN Fellowship: Country Programs as Complex Systems: Evaluating Large‑Scale, Multidimensional Country Engagements in a Multilateral Development Bank
The Independent Evaluation Department (IED) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is developing new guidelines for country assistance program evaluations (CAPEs). At the country level, ADB’s evaluation framework comprises three distinct and complementary products embedded in the country program cycle. I led the development of new guidelines for country assistance program reviews (CAPRs) and their independent validations (CAPRVs), which were released in 2025. While CAPRs are self‑evaluations undertaken by operations teams, CAPRVs provide independent validation by IED. I am now leading the development of the CAPE guidelines. Unlike CAPRVs, CAPEs are full‑fledged, independent evaluations conducted by IED and involve substantial primary data collection. In 2025, I piloted a new approach to CAPEs through the evaluation of ADB’s country program in Kazakhstan. The pilot highlighted the analytical challenge of capturing the complexity of country programs and their development contexts. A key finding was that ADB’s predominantly transactional approach to country programming limited its development impact, as it failed to address entrenched challenges from a systems perspective. The core challenge the fellowship will address is how CAPE guidelines can enable more systemic assessments of country programs, capturing interdependencies across upstream, midstream, and downstream interventions spanning multiple sectors and thematic areas.
About Michael
Michael Florian is a Senior Evaluation Specialist in the Independent Evaluation Department (IED) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which he joined in 2022. A sociologist by training with a strong methodological focus, he brings more than 15 years of international evaluation experience across multilateral, bilateral, and NGO settings—including ADB, GIZ, UNICEF, and USAID—spanning diverse country contexts across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. At IED, his work centers on thematic and country-level evaluations: he currently leads the redesign of IED’s country-level evaluation products and recently led IED’s evaluation of ADB’s engagement in upper middle-income countries, a learning-focused evaluation to inform the Bank’s engagement with its economically most advanced developing member countries.
