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Paper short abstract

Widespread adoption of Value for Investment in the UK brings exciting opportunities but also quality risks. This panel explores lessons, pitfalls, and pathways for safeguarding fidelity as VfI scales across the public sector.

Paper long abstract

Value for Investment (VfI) is gaining rapid traction across the UK public sector as a practical, principles-driven approach to assessing the quality and value of public spending. For example, VfI methods are now a core module in the Evaluation Task Force’s government evaluation academy training. The widespread adoption of VfI guidance and training creates both opportunities and risks. On one hand, uptake can catalyse further development, refinement, and integration of the approach. On the other, without sufficient quality assurance, there is the danger of superficial application - evaluations that claim VfI compliance yet do not meet its core principles or minimum specifications. This session will explore these opportunities and risks, drawing on perspectives from originators of VfI, early adopters, experienced commissioners, and long-term practitioners. Presentations will cover the evolution of the approach, experience from early implementation, lessons from embedding VfI within organisational systems, and recommendations for sustaining integrity as adoption accelerates. The session will conclude with proposals for strengthening VfI quality assurance in the UK and invite the audience to reflect on what this means for their own practice.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation introduces evaluative reasoning as a conceptual, ethical and methodological response to valuing humanitarian innovation. We will present the rationale, development and potential application of our framework, suited to a complex and uncertain sector and environments.

Paper long abstract

Value for Money (VfM) is an evaluative question about the merit, worth and significance of resource use (Peterson and Skolits, 2020) increasingly required as part of evaluations, including those of development and humanitarian programmes funded by the ODA budget.

Quantitative approaches such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA) are frequently regarded as the gold standard, but they rely on extensive, precise data and high levels of quantification rarely feasible in humanitarian contexts.

In contrast, innovation can be described as a “process of virtuous ignorance” (Warner, 2017) being inherently uncertain, exploratory and iterative, with high failure rates, complicating efforts to measure costs and benefits. Yet, in a context of shrinking budgets and increasing humanitarian needs, ensuring that limited funds are used responsibility and to maximise benefits is critical.

To address this, we at Elrha have developed a VfM assessment framework specifically tailored to humanitarian innovation, seeking to align credibility and robustness with humanitarian principles. In doing so, we explored the potential offered by common Value for Money approaches, with a particular focus on CBA, given its ability to bring together a range of benefits, tangible and intangible, to a single clear figure, easy to compare to benchmarks, through the monetisation of benefits. Testing CBA on two humanitarian innovations in partnership with economic VfM specialists identified a range of conceptual, ethical and practical problems to applying CBA to the humanitarian innovation sector.

Conceptually, CBA is ill-suited to representing qualitative outcomes and complex values without resorting to extensive assumptions. Market distortions and lack of relevant willingness-to-pay data undermine efforts to monetise intangible benefits, resulting in apparent precision at the expense of accuracy. Ethically, ‘traditional’ methods used to derive values for benefits in conducting a CBA would, in the humanitarian innovation sector, force choices which should not have to be made and may lead to discrimination through rationality. The utilitarian basis of CBA does not align with humanitarian values, and the aggregation of results can mask risks of harm to vulnerable populations. Practically, conducting CBA around humanitarian innovation incurs significant resource and skill demands - unlikely to lead to good ‘value for money’ of the analysis itself.

Elrha's framework evaluates humanitarian innovation against six benefit criteria (likelihood of success, learning potential, significance of change, scalability, equity, and environmental impact) and two cost criteria, development and implementation expenses. Each assessment is accompanied by transparent justification and the full results are subject to a ‘do no harm’ review that supersedes other considerations.

Rather than targeting a single summary score, this approach is designed to facilitate dialogue among practitioners, funders, and policymakers. By integrating both qualitative and quantitative evidence, it encourages transparent discussion of tradeoffs and fosters more informed, evidence-based decisions about innovation selection and funding in dynamic and uncertain contexts.

This presentation shares the rationale, development, and application of our framework, highlighting its capacity to support responsible investment decisions in humanitarian innovation. The approach demonstrates how methodological adaptation can meet the sector’s ethical and practical requirements while promoting meaningful VfM assessments.

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Paper short abstract

The abstract describes how co-creation and evaluative rubrics help evaluators and stakeholders explain Value for Money without depending on economic ratios alone. It demonstrates a practical approach for making VfM assessments more transparent, context-specific and decision-useful.

Paper long abstract

The Magenta Book recommends Social Cost–Benefit Analysis (SCBA) and Social Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (SCEA) as preferred approaches for assessing Value for Money (VfM). A key strength of these economic methods is their ability to clearly communicate complexity. Expressing value as outcomes-per-pound or £8 of benefits for every £1 invested offers a neat and compelling comparison across interventions. However, most evaluators of complex interventions know that SCBA and SCEA alone are rarely the best approaches for evaluating complexity. Despite this, there remains a hesitancy to use qualitative or mixed methods approaches for VfM assessments.

This hesitancy is often less about concerns over the “rigour” of qualitative methods and more about benchmarking and evaluative reasoning – that is, how we judge what “good” performance looks like. Quantitative targets and break-even points appear unambiguous; qualitative evidence, by contrast, is perceived as less “SMART,” more open to interpretation and therefore easier to game.

The Value for Investment (VfI) approach offers a structured alternative. It begins with co-creation processes involving commissioners, implementers, communities and other stakeholders to define the intervention’s value proposition. Stakeholders then develop context-specific criteria and performance standards (captured through evaluative rubrics) before considering methods or evidence sources.

Thinking about evidence requirements last shifts the focus from methods to reasoning. Sometimes economic analysis is appropriate; sometimes it is not. What matters is that criteria and standards are clear, defensible and support decision making. Co-developing definitions of “excellent performance” builds a shared understanding of what stakeholders are trying to achieve. If assessments later judge performance to be weaker, evaluators can transparently explain why and what needs to improve.

The Value for Investment approach also strengthens collective sensemaking. Using rubrics in this way helps position economic methods as one source of evidence rather than the dominant method for assessing VfM. For example, SCBA or SCEA can be valuable for assessing whether the overall benefits of an intervention outweigh its costs (cost-effectiveness), but they are often less useful for evaluating dimensions such as equity or systems change. By defining performance using multiple forms of evidence (instead of relying on a single economic indicator such a benefit-cost-ratio to determine VfM) the approach makes clear that economic analysis provides only part of the story. Rubrics integrate these different perspectives, enabling a more rounded and meaningful assessment of value.

The session will draw on practical experience applying co-creation and the VfI approach in UK local government and housing policy, and in global health, demonstrating how these processes strengthen the credibility and communicability of VfM findings.