Workshop 8 - Evaluating at the Nexus of Development and Environment: Challenges and Opportunities

Global environmental changes are occurring at a faster pace than previously thought. In several areas, damage to the global environment has exceeded critical levels and threatens to lead to irreversible changes in global ecosystems. While the international community has invested sizeable resources to address the growing environmental issues, environmental financing needs are huge relative to demand, and remain largely unmet. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) take an integrated approach linking the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental. While such integration is necessary to move towards sustainable development, it poses significant challenges for evaluation.

This workshop draws upon evaluation experiences of the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). In 2017 it completed the sixth
comprehensive evaluation of the GEF, based on 29 individual evaluations and studies, which provided evaluative evidence of GEF results, impacts and performance utilizing quantitative, qualitative and geospatial methods. IEO has continued to strengthen environmental evaluation, including measuring transformational change and additionality of environmental finance, and how to scale up pilot initiatives. Its evaluations have had to address head-on synergies and trade-offs between various environmental objectives, as well as environmental objectives vs. socioeconomic development. The workshop requires intermediate understanding of evaluation and an interest in environment and sustainable development.

Facilitators: Juha I. Uitto, Carlo Carugi, Jeneen Garcia, and Anupam Anand