This volume is the result of a shared vision by the three editors, Joanne Asquith, Shahrokh Fardoust, and Mark Sundberg, and the Director General of the Asian Development Bank’s Independent Evaluation Department, Marvin Taylor-Dormond, to gather evaluative evidence on the important but often poorly understood and under-evaluated policy-based lending development finance instrument used by many development institutions. We are grateful to the several senior evaluators in the independent evaluation departments of the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank (AsDB), the Caribbean Development Bank, the Europe Commission, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank who worked to bring to the evidence from each of their institutions together. We are also grateful to Dr. Emmanuel Jimenez, the current Director-General of Evaluation at the Asian Development Bank, who has supported work bringing the volume to closure. 

The comparative work was initiated at a virtual conference in November 2020, organized by the Asian Development Bank (IED), which brought together for the first time the independent evaluation department of the above mentioned six major multilateral development financial institutions to examine evidence on the design and implementation, use and performance of their of policy- based budget support financing instruments over the preceding decade.

An important contribution to the volume has been made by six experts in development economics who were invited to prepare and shared their comments on each chapter: Shanta Devarajan, Alan Gelb, Cheryl Gray, Homi Kharas, Ali Khadr, and Augusto de la Torre. We are very grateful for their expert contributions. 

Many Asian Development Bank staff in the Independent Evaluation Department contributed valuable time to this effort. We would like to thank in particular Saleha Waseem, Yurendra Basnett, and Sergio Villena for their help and suggestions at various stages of the project. The team is also grateful to Al Dingwall, ADB Publication Department, and William Hurlbut for their highly professional editorial support.

Finally, we would like to thank ASSYST International Pvt. Ltd. for their hard work in preparing the digital version of the volume in a highly professional and timely manner. 

Joanne Asquith, Shahrokh Fardoust, Mark Sundberg

September 2023