Great article, really interesting observations Nancy!

It has been a longstanding irony that results-based management has not needed to demonstrate beneficial results in order to be trumpeted far and wide as the solution to public service provision. Given that fact and your point about how legitimacy works in the aid system, it is unsurprising that the evaluations of RBM at the UN and other donor agencies show time and time again the same 2 things:
1) they have been successful in getting a whole lot of 'data' collected, targets set and tracked, but
2) there is little to no evidence of this information actually being used in order to improve practice (leaving aside the question that you touch on, of how meaningful is this data that is collected anyway)