Moderator
- Alan Fox, Deputy Director, IEO, UNDP
Panellists
- Indran Naidoo, Director, Independent Office of Evaluation, IFAD
- Andrea Cook, Director, Evaluation, WFP
- Anastasia Aladysheva, Impact Evaluation Officer, Green Climate Fund,Independent Evaluation Unit
- Bala Yusuf-Yunusa, Senior Technical Advisor, Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on SDGs (OSSAP-SDGs), Nigeria
- Olivier Cossée, Senior Evaluation Office, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Development pathways have had a hand in shaping the Anthropocene. Evaluation must consider development impacts across all programmes and not only those addressing environment, climate and food security. Is evaluation facing up to this reality?
- The world has fundamentally changed, and evaluators cannot be detached from this change.There is a need for a new definition of development and a new way to measure development. We need to move from the anthropocentric approach that has dominated evaluation to one that is more environmentally focused and that amplifies marginalized voices. We need to be more activistic in our approaches and bring about the change that is necessary.
- United Nations agencies are innovating to address new development challenges. There is a need to increasingly focus on critical issues, looking at how to bring affected populations’ voices into evaluation, how to bring in environmental aspects, a food systems perspective, a humanitarian-development-peace nexus perspective, without overburdening an already overloaded system. We need to build bodies of evidence that will help us to deliver on transformational change. Integrating systems-thinking helps make connections.
- Better evidence is critical. We need to better understand how evidence from development interventions can inform climate adaptation interventions, to know whether awareness of climate risks will lead to changes in behaviour. The humanitarian‑development-peace nexus helps us understand how coherent approaches are needed to address vulnerabilities, but a climate angle needs to be added to the nexus paradigm. Impact needs to be looked at in multiple dimensions.
- Country-led evaluation is powerful. The 2030 Agenda was a universal call to action, to free humanity from the tyranny of poverty and to save our planet. Nigeria has taken this very seriously, establishing the Office of the Senior Special Assistant on SDGs, and commissioning of a country-led evaluation of SDGs 3 and 4 which will be used to strengthen policy formulation. Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) are more useful when they are guided by evidence.
- Too much evaluation is a bad thing. Evaluation has become wiser and more institutionalized, but less disruptive. If by institutionalizing evaluation we prioritize coverage, we lose on utility. Evaluation has made less progress in the fields of agriculture, rural development and environment; there is an opportunity to promote evaluation in these sectors, while avoiding the challenges other sectors have faced. With respect to national evaluation capacity development (ECD), while training and other support is needed, it is important to support strong national evaluations, particularly in the agriculture and rural development sectors.
Conclusion
Evaluation has made significant progress in recent years but needs to shift further to be responsive to crisis and help address rising climate shocks and threats to the integrity of our planet, to serve sectors that have lagged behind, and retain its sharp edge. It needs to recognise where the need is and ensure it is well placed to inform decision-making in critical areas, times and sectors.
Sub Title
Rethinking evaluation to address the crisis in the Anthropocene
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Session Category
Title1
Plenary 2
Video URL text
https://www.youtube.com/embed/iTW4pDLOuu4