Evaluation as a catalyst for environmental transformation and sustainability

In the recent years, we have seen an alarming rise in environmental crises; including; climate change, deforestation, biodiversity, air, water and soil quality. These rapid environmental changes have thus called for the pressing need to consider environmental impacts into all evaluations.
The environmental crises are a monstrous issue that cannot be tackled by lone standing parties. To successfully mitigate the challenges and find solutions to existing and future crises; effective and transformative collaboration is imperative. For this reason, the Footprint Evaluation Initiative, an international collaborative initiative provides support to evaluators and evaluation managers to consider environmental sustainability in all evaluations.
Footprint Evaluations is not a specific methodology or rigidly prescribed approach, but rather an emerging set of principles developed through ongoing, continuous collaboration and adaptions to complement different contexts. Though the label comes from the notion of the ‘footprint’ humans make on the environment, footprint evaluation embodies more than the footprint (impact) of programme interventions. It involves exploring different types of nexus (connections) between humans and natural systems.
On the 9th of March 2023, CLEAR-AA, one of six regional centres that are housed in academic institutions around the Globe with a purpose to improve how monitoring and evaluation, had the enlightening pleasure of engaging with the likes of, Andy Rowe, Kaye Stevens and Patricia Rogers from Footprint Evaluation. This informative discussion provoked many thoughts including how best to include environmental impacts when developing policy, implementing evaluation plans, and performing capacity strengthening activities amongst our other duties.
Since theme to be tackled during the gLocal evaluation week is: ‘Evaluation for transformational change: balancing ambition and realism’, we propose to facilitate meaningful engagement with pertinent contributors (i.e. policy-makers, evaluators, experts on environmental issues) to discuss how best to use evaluation as a catalyst for transformation and include environmental impacts in ALL evaluations. CLEAR AA would like to facilitate a session of different government and non-government institutions to share their experience of key findings for lesson learned, challenges such as what works and what does not work during the pursuit of using evaluation to effect transformation with a focus on environmental sustainability. This session will take a form of a panel discussion where each institution will present their lessons within the gLocal context thematic area for developing resilient M&E Systems.
We recognize that M&E must continue to strive to involve the voices of those most affected by policy interventions in question and work to bring more diverse stakeholders to the table. Some of the questions to be considered include:
What are the key collaborative arrangements needed to generate successful evaluations that address issues of climate change, resilience, adaptation, sustainability?
To what extent has there been collaboration in and outside of the public sector to deal with issues of climate change, resilience, sustainability and adaptation from evaluations?
In recognizing and acknowledging the need to involve the voices of those most affected by policy intervention, it is important to consider the extent of participation and involvement of marginalized people during policy-development, evaluation planning and evaluations.To what extent are the voices of these people included when considering issues of climate change, resilience, sustainability and adaption in policies and evaluations?)