Evaluating Environment in International Development

This book provides novel and in-depth perspectives on evaluating environment and sustainability issues in developing countries. Evaluating Environment in International Development focuses on the approaches and experiences of leading international organizations, not-for-profits, and multilateral and bilateral aid agencies to illustrate how systematic evaluation is an essential tool for providing evidence for decision-makers. Moving beyond projects and programmes, it explores normative work on the environment as well as environmental consequences of economic and social development efforts. This new edition reflects on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals and considers how they have influenced efforts in a wide range of countries and what the implications are for evaluation. It also explores ways in which Big Data and geospatial approaches might be utilized. Significantly updated throughout to reflect recent developments in climate change research, and on the implications of the 2020 pandemic, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of environment studies, development studies, international relations, sustainable development and evaluation, as well as practitioners in international organizations and development and environmental NGOs. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003094821, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Juha I. Uitto is a leading thinker and practitioner in environmental evaluation. Since 2014, he has been director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Prior to coming to his current position, he worked for more than two decades on evaluation and research on environment and development, most recently in the UNDP Independent Evaluation Office.

Foreword Michael Quinn Patton Preface Juha I. Uitto Part 1: Introduction and Conceptual Background 1. Evaluating Environment in International Development: An Introduction Juha I. Uitto 2. A Global Public Goods Perspective on Environment and Poverty Rob D. van den Berg 3. Evaluation at the Nexus: Evaluating Sustainable Development in the 2020s Andy Rowe 4. Poverty, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction: Too Complex to Evaluate? Hazel Todd and David Todd Part 2: Approaches and Challenges in Evaluating Environment and Sustainable Development 5. Using Big Data and Geospatial Approaches in Evaluating Environmental Interventions Anupam Anand and Geeta Batra 6. Multiple Actors and Confounding Factors: Evaluating Impact in Complex Social-ecological Systems Aaron Zazueta and Jeneen R. Garcia 7. Assessing Progress Towards Impact in Environmental Programmes David Todd and Rob Craig 8. Meta-Assessment of Climate Mitigation Evaluations Christine Wörlen 9. A Programme Theory Approach to Evaluating Normative Environmental Interventions Segbedzi Norgbey and Michael Spilsbury 10. From Evaluation of Joint programmes to Joint Evaluation of SDGs-ready Interventions: Lessons from the Joint GEF-UNDP Evaluation of the Small Grants Programme Carlo Carugi and Heather Bryant 11. Evaluating the Poverty-Environment Nexus in Africa Michael Stocking 12. Small Grants, Big Impacts: Aggregation Challenges Sulan Chen and Juha I. Uitto 13. Green Economy Performance of Environmental Initiatives in Latin-America and the Caribbean Ronal Gainza and Simon Lobach 14. Evaluating International Support to Transboundary Aquifer Management Programmes Alan Fox 15. Disaster Risk Management in the SDG Era Vijayalakshmi Vadivelu 16. The CGIAR Approach to Evaluation of Climate Change, Environment, and Natural Resources Management Roberto La Rovere