Sustainability‐Ready Evaluation: A Call to Action

Abstract

Evaluation is at the cusp of two urgent challenges: indigenous evaluation and sustainability. How we respond to these challenges can dramatically affect the future of evaluation. A sustainability‐ready evaluation will be transformative. It will be an evaluation that recognizes that human and natural systems are coupled, and that evaluation portfolios are now and will increasingly be affected by our connections to natural system forces including climate. Sustainability‐ready evaluation will be an evaluation that reaches well past the intervention to important public policy goals and to key sustainability challenges. Evaluating coupled human and natural systems will be challenging. Fortunately, technical barriers do not prevent us from starting to infuse sustainability into evaluation; the barriers are social and associated with the worldview and vision of evaluation. To facilitate the development of sustainability‐ready evaluation, this paper provides an initial checklist and references to useful resources. Absent transformations to become sustainability‐ready evaluation will lack relevance for many of the current and future key issues of our times. Fields lacking relevance are themselves not sustainable.

Evaluation Criteria for Evaluating Transformation: Implications for the Coronavirus Pandemic and the Global Climate Emergency

“…It combines attention to both environmental and economic efficiencies (Ehrenfeld, 2005; OECD Secretariat, 2002). Rowe (2019) has sounded a “call to action” aimed at evaluators to incorporate a two-system framework connecting human and natural systems to design “sustainability-ready evaluations.”…”

“…Adaptive ecological sustainability has emerged as a priority criterion for evaluation (Julnes, 2019a; Ofir, 2018a, 2018c; Rowe, 2019; Uitto, 2019). Neither the original nor the revised DAC criteria address adaptive ecological sustainability as a priority.…”

Evaluators in the Anthropocene

“…Addressing the environmental challenge will require adopting transformative and ecological approaches in all evaluations, adopting planetary lenses to respond to the wicked problem that analyzing the human and natural nexus constitutes (Uitto, 2019a; Bours et al, 2015). This work has fortunately started as some evaluators have recently raised awareness and suggested different approaches to evaluation: Rowe (2018, 2019), Uitto and colleagues (Uitto, 2019b; Uitto et al, 2017), Patton (2020). Other evaluators have been trying to integrate into their work some dimensions of environmental sustainability as they address questions related to international development (van den Berg et al, 2019, for example).…”

Rapid impact evaluation

“…Many of the constraints on impact evaluation approaches arise from challenges identifying and operationalizing the counterfactual. Some of these are as follows: uneven temporal occurrence of impacts; technically feasible options such as with/without the intervention are often not regarded as efficacious, legal, or ethical (Boyd and Mason, 2011); complex, ambiguous, and highly contingent causality often have too many moving parts and lack sufficient data; impacts can occur over widely differing spatial scales which certainly for natural systems do not align with the spatial scales of the program; and the program definition and accountability frames can disconnect them from many of the important resulting impacts (Rowe, 2018; Rowe, 2019).…”