On 18 October 2022, the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced the appointment of the new Director of the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), Pablo Moreno, who will succeed Charles Collyns when his term expires on 30 April 2023. Moreno is a Spanish citizen currently serving as IMF executive director representing Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Spain, a position he has held since November 2020. A change in leadership has also been announced at the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), with Alison Evans leaving the Director General position after four years, although no successor has been announced yet.

Further to this, the IMF IEO published its 2023 work plan introducing two new evaluations alongside its ongoing review of the IMF’s emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic: A full-scale Exceptional Access Policy (EAP) evaluation and a shorter Applying the IMF’s Mandate evaluation.

The EAP evaluation – a framework under which the Fund can provide large-scale financial support to its members – will focus on reviewing the EA criteria and assess risk mitigation processes associated with large IMF lending. The IMF mandate evaluation comes in a context where the Fund’s agenda has broadened substantially over the past decade, including topics that were previously assessed to be macro-critical but outside the Fund’s existing core of expertise, such as gender (see Observer Spring 2022) and climate (see Observer Autumn 2021). The evaluation will explore the governance surrounding the process for broadening the Fund’s work programme, the role of stakeholders, the trade-offs between new and existing work and resource adequacy for undertaking activities beyond the IMF core expertise.