A new practical guide, The Footprint Evaluation Typology Guide, was launched in October 2025 by the Footprint Evaluation Initiative in collaboration with the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval). The guide introduces a clear, four-level scale that helps evaluators, program managers, and decision-makers assess whether a project, program, or policy is causing net environmental harm, achieving no net harm, or actively contributing to environmental restoration.
Developed in response to the growing need to integrate environmental sustainability into all evaluations—not only those with explicit environmental goals—the guide provides a structured way to synthesize mixed-method evidence into transparent, actionable conclusions. By offering a common evaluative language, the Typology supports more consistent use of evidence in decision-making on sustainability across sectors and institutional contexts.
The Footprint Evaluation Typology was first developed and applied during a major evaluation for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), focused on smallholder farmers’ adaptation to climate change. The guide illustrates this early application alongside a 2024–2025 evaluation of the National Planning Department of Colombia, which assessed the environmental sustainability implications of government IT systems across 110 public entities.
The Colombia-based evaluation received technical support from DEval, the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI), and the Center for Learning on Evaluation and Results for Lusophone Africa and Brazil (CLEAR–LAB), an implementing partner of GEI. Using survey data and tailored evaluative rubrics, the team successfully adapted the Typology to a highly constrained data environment, generating clear and comparable sustainability ratings across institutions.
“This guide is a ‘learner tool’—like training wheels on a bicycle,” said Jane Davidson, co-author and member of the core team of the Footprint Evaluation Initiative. “It gives evaluators and decision-makers a simple, structured way to make robust judgments about environmental impact, even when they are just starting out or working with limited data.”
The guide emphasizes that while achieving "no net harm" is an important step, the scale of existing environmental damage means that evaluation practice must increasingly engage with restorative practices that leave ecosystems in a better condition than before. It also introduces the Equity-Sustainability Matrix, a companion tool designed to visualize how initiatives perform across both environmental and equity dimensions.
The Footprint Evaluation Typology Guide is freely available for download from the Footprint Evaluation Initiative’s website in English and Spanish. Andy Rowe, co-author and member of the initiative's core team, noted: “By offering a common evaluative language, the Typology creates a stronger shared understanding of environmental sustainability for decision-makers in various sectors and institutional contexts.”
