evaluation (M&E) officers to support follow-up activities. This team is paired with researchers for a week with the express objective of developing evaluations to inform project designs. This is a relevant sample because the typical WB/IDB-supported project is developed through the interactions of people in these types of roles.<sup>1</sup> A more detailed set of profiles for each type of policy professional and their role in project and policy decision-making can be found in the appendix.

We surveyed 190 policy professionals, providing them with descriptions of programs that are each associated with an impact evaluation result and asking them to choose between them. The impact evaluations attached to the programs differ by their identification strategy; location; impact; and the precision of the estimate. We compare how participants weigh these impact evaluation results relative to advice from a local expert.

We find that policymakers place a relatively high weight on contextual factors, such as whether a local expert recommended the program and whether the program was evaluated by an impact evaluation in their country. This may be due to concerns with how much rigorous evidence from one setting may be transportable to another (Pritchett and Sandefur, 2015; Vivalt, 2020), an important consideration when papers are still fairly geographically clustered (Leight, 2022). Policy practitioners also care about contextual factors but additionally pay attention to the internal validity of evidence from impact evaluations, preferring programs evaluated by RCTs and programs with results that were precisely estimated.

Our study builds on existing work exploring the decision-making processes of policymakers. Rogger and Somani (2023) find that bureaucrats in Ethiopia have beliefs about their constituencies that vary significantly from official statistics and that pro-

> 1Specifically, governments typically have priority targets or policy areas (such as increasing school enrollment) and will request donor support to finance activities that support achieving these outcomes. Initial project designs will typically resemble existing / past activities, and teams may draw on both tacit information and existing evidence from impact evaluation studies and other research (if it exists) on how effective these activities have been and make adjustments based on an iterative process, incorporating different inputs that people/organizations preparing the project bring to the discussion. This culminates in a draft “project document” that outlines the actual components that will be implemented to achieve the higher-level outcomes, which is then reviewed by senior management and adjusted to develop a final project plan for sign off. Throughout this process, decisions about which components will form part of the project and the nature of these project components are influenced by information available to the project preparation team who need to decide how to use this information to adapt the project plan. The sample included in this study was purposely selected based on their role in this particular process that guides how the pipeline of WB/IDB-supported projects are developed.

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