Evaluation must rise to the challenge of pandemic in the nexus of nature and humanity

This blog was published originally in Earth-Eval (follow the link).

In her 2020 Earth Day blog the GEF CEO Naoko Ishii emphasized that the COVID-19 crisis is fundamentally an environmental crisis. I couldn’t agree more. Sure, at the face of it, this is first a health crisis, a pandemic with tragic consequences to people who get infected, especially those who perish or who see loved ones perish. Economies of families, communities, companies, states and countries are stressed, even destroyed. It’ll take months and years to recover from these effects. However short-sighted it may be, I can understand why people and businesses—and by extension politicians—clamor to get the economy re-opened as soon as possible. But fundamentally, this is an environmental crisis and if we do not change our behavior, if we do not learn from this experience, these pandemic crises will become a recurrent phenomenon. We as evaluators must also learn lessons.

The virus, SARS-CoV-2 that causes the disease COVID-19 is zoonotic, meaning it has its origins in animals. As human activities have continued to expand further into previously undisturbed natural domains and as our interactions with domestic and wild animals have become increasingly close, we have given ample new opportunities for pathogens to spill over from non-human animals to humans. The root causes are the same that drive climate change, species loss and all environmental degradation: economic growth, quest for more resources and space for humanity. There are currently 7.5 billion humans on the planet and our numbers are going to expand by 2 billion more in the coming few decades. Inequality has grown to intolerable levels, while consumption continues to grow at unsustainable rates. There is an urgent need to revisit how we define development and how we treat natural environment. The pandemic that has hit pause on economic activity has also provided us an opportunity to rethink our values and what kind of development we want when we press start again. For this we need information about possible models.

Evaluation has the specific role of bringing forth knowledge and understanding of what works under what circumstances based on past experiences. At a basic level, this is looking at past programs and projects with regard to how we have dealt with sudden outbreaks of health crises, such as SARS and Ebola, and other unexpected disasters. What strategies worked, where and why? What helped interventions adjust successfully so that they could continue supporting the people on the ground? The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) is currently looking at such experiences in the GEF context and will soon be able to bring forth some lessons for consideration.

At a higher level, evaluation must be able to provide evidence of how actions in the development sphere affect the environment and vice versa. We must be able to demonstrate the close interlinkages between social and economic development and the environment in light of evidence from the real world. In this task evaluators must base their work on scientific knowledge as well as analysis of concrete examples from the field. This is not an approach that comes easily to all evaluators who have been used to looking at discrete interventions in isolation through their internal logic. Instead, we now need to place these interventions in the broader landscape and analyze how they interact with the broader natural and human systems. We need to be on the lookout for unanticipated results and unintended consequences, not just those foreseen in the project’s or program’s own theory of change.

To remain relevant in the increasingly complex and interconnected world, it is absolutely essential for evaluation as a profession and as a practice to engage in the discourse at the nexus of human and natural systems. That is where we as a community can contribute, with our practical knowledge anchored in research, to a transformation towards a more sustainable development path.

Evaluating Environmental Peacebuilding: Difficult but Necessary

Published in Earth-Eval earlier today (please follow the link before).

When you first hear the phrase “environmental peacebuilding,” you may think that these two words are not directly linked. Think again. Many conflicts around the world affect and are affected by, at least indirectly, the environment and natural resources. For example, the extraction of minerals like cobalt, coltan, and gold in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has both decimated the natural environment and fueled ongoing conflict between the national military and various militias. On the other hand, the natural environment and its management can also serve as a mechanism for connecting conflicting parties and supporting peace. Water resource management, for instance, has been an important domain for building trust and developing a shared identity in the Middle East.

Upon reading this, your second thought may be that efforts to both manage the natural environment sustainably and to build lasting peace are elusive and difficult to measure. There you would be right. But this difficulty should not stop us from trying, as we need to know that the policies, strategies, programs and projects that we are engaged in are achieving their objectives of contributing positively to environmental peacebuilding. We also want to know that the results are sustainable in political, social, economic, and environmental terms. As these interventions by definition operate in conflict-affected situations, it is very important that we know who benefits and that the benefits accrue equitably to the various parties involved. Otherwise, the interventions may bring temporary peace but fail to address the root causes of conflict, potentially even perpetuating them. Assessing these results also provides the information we need to learn what we could do better in the future.

Good practice for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in the context of environmental peacebuilding is still emerging, and there are specific challenges that go beyond what program managers and evaluators face in more common development situations. In environmental peacebuilding, the context is always very complex, and that complexity adds to the challenges of doing good M&E. For example, we cannot rely on linear theories of change but must instead find ways to capture the dynamic and fluid interactions of an intervention and the multifaceted results it produces. Additionally, although the timelines for impact are often very long, we have immediate needs for information that will tell us whether we are doing the right things. We often do not know what the baselines are or the benchmarks against which we are measuring our performance. Institutional capacities and resources for M&E are often insufficient, and there are political challenges in conflict-affected situations. For instance, who owns the evaluation function or the data that are generated and used for reporting in these situations? How might the use of evaluation findings affect the conflict? The challenges can appear endless.

To tackle them, we must take a holistic view of the situation rather than looking narrowly at a single intervention through its internal logic. Each intervention takes place in a dynamic environment where there are multiple interests, actors, and interactions between them. Situations are ripe for unintended consequences. To develop good practice, we must develop evidence based on what works in these complex environments, and we must be open to discussing both our successes and failures.

The Environmental Peacebuilding Association, itself still a new endeavor, has recently established an M&E Interest Group. As a community of researchers and practitioners, we seek to activate learning and enhance our shared capacities to assess and document the impacts of environmental peacebuilding. This includes understanding and documenting effective practices for the future as well as the pitfalls and unintended consequences of both environmental peacebuilding and its M&E. We would like to extend an invitation to interested readers to take part in this journey and join the Interest Group. More information can be found here.