Arviointi auttaa GEF:iä kohdistamaan rahoituksensa tehokkaasti

 

Maailmanlaajuinen ympäristörahasto (Global Environment Facility GEF) on maailman vanhin monenkeskinen rahasto, joka sijoittaa kehittyvien maiden ympäristötyöhön. Se on jakanut 30-vuotisen historiansa aikana rahoitusta miljardien edestä. Vastuu merkittävien rahavirtojen kanavoimisesta on saanut GEFin ottamaan arvioinnin vakavasti.

Itsenäinen evaluaatiotoimisto toimii GEF:n organisaatiokaaviossa omana yksikkönään, ja sen johtajana raportoin suoraan johtokunnalle. Tehtävänämme on tuottaa riippumattomaan arviointiin perustuvaa tietoa rahaston ja sen rahoittamien hankkeiden tuloksista ja vaikuttavuudesta sekä  yhteistyön toimivuudesta kokonaisuudessaan. Koska GEF:n rahoittamat ohjelmat ja hankkeet toteutetaan eri järjestöjen  kuten Maailmanpankin, muutamien YK-järjestöjen ja isojen, ympäristöön keskittyvien kansalaisjärjestöjen kautta, tehtävämme on myös valvoa, että nämä arvioivat toteuttamansa hankkeet sovitulla tavalla.

Olemme juuri julkistaneet seitsemännen kokonaisvaltaisen arvion meneillään olevia  lisärahoitusneuvotteluja varten. Tämä evaluaatio tuo yhteen löydökset 34:stä eri osa-arvioinnista, joita toimistomme on laatinut lähes kolmen vuoden ajan. Kaikkiaan GEF on rahoittanut historiansa aikana yli 5 000 hanketta. Näistä jokainen loppuun saatettu hanke on arvioitu. Nämä hanketason arvioinnit ovat meille aarreaitta, kun tutkimme trendejä rahoituksen painopisteissä ja hankkeiden tuloksissa. Ne tuovat myös esiin erittäin rikkaan kirjon syitä, jotka selittävät hankkeiden onnistumisten edellytyksiä ja antavat osviittaa sille, mihin GEF:n ja sen järjestöjen kannattaisi panostaa.

Emme kuitenkaan tukeudu ainoastaan hanketason arviointeihin, joita toteuttajaorganisaatiot ja konsultit ovat tehneet, vaan teemme myös itse omia tutkimuksiamme. Esimerkiksi viimeisimmän kokonaisarvioinnin osana päätimme tutkia tarkemmin, mistä mitattavat erot eri maaryhmien välillä hankkeiden tuloksissa johtuvat. Kun vaikkapa Kiinassa ja Meksikossa yhdeksän kymmenestä hankkeesta onnistuu erinomaisesti, on vastaava luku Afrikassa paljon alhaisempi. Teimme maaryhmäarvioinnit vähiten kehittyneistä maista  yleensä ja Sahelin alueesta erityisesti sekä pienistä saarivaltioista. Arvioinnit valaisivat näiden maaryhmien erityisongelmia, joihin kuuluvat matala institutionaalinen kapasiteetti ja vähäiset henkilöresurssit. Etenkin köyhimmissä maissa on tärkeää, että ympäristöhankkeet auttavat myös ihmisiä toimeentulon hankkimisessa.

Teimme lisäksi erityisen arvioinnin maista, joissa haavoittuvuus ja konfliktitilanteet vaikuttavat hankkeisiin, sillä GEF:n rahoittamista hankkeista yli puolet toteutetaan juuri tällaisissa maissa. Arvioinnin mukaan heikko turvallisuustilanne ja kysymykset eri toimijoiden legitimiteetistä ovat suoranaisia uhkia hankkeille. Toisaalta löysimme esimerkkejä hankkeista, jotka olivat paikallisen väestön kannalta erityisen tervetulleita, sillä ne paransivat luonnonvarainhoidon kautta ihmisten toimeentuloa ja elintarviketurvaa sekä auttoivat paikallisyhteisöjä toimimaan yhteistyössä. GEF ei kuitenkaan systemaattisesti ota paikallista tilannetta huomioon ohjelmatoiminnassaan. Arviointi kehottaakin rahastoa parantamaan käytäntöään jatkossa.

Viime vuosina GEF:n strategiat ovat siirtyneet selkeästi sektoriaalisista ympäristöhankkeista integroituihin ohjelmiin, joiden kohteena ovat ympäristöön vaikuttavat yhteiskunnalliset prosessit. Ohjelmat kohdistuvat ruoantuotantoon ja maankäyttöön, kaupunkeihin ja tuotantoketjuihin, joilla on erityisen suuri ympäristövaikutus. Päivittäiset tuotteet, kuten soijapavut, palmuöljy ja liha, ovat suurimpia syitä trooppiseen metsäkatoon ja vaikuttavat suuresti niin ilmastonmuutokseen kuin biodiversiteetin katoamiseenkin. Kaupungit kuluttavat kaksi kolmasosaa maailman energiasta ja päästävät ilmoille 70 prosenttia kasvihuonekaasuista. Niiden hallitsematon kasvu kehitysmaissa johtaa tärkeiden ekosysteemien tuhoon ja metsäkatoon ja samalla tekee kaupungeista ja niiden väestöstä hyvin haavoittuvaisia ilmastonmuutoksen vaikutuksille. Toisaalta hyvällä kaupunkisuunnittelulla kaikkia näitä ongelmia voidaan ratkaista.

Nämä ohjelmat ovat sen verran uusia, että niiden vaikutuksia on liian varhaista arvioida. Olemme kuitenkin pyrkineet ennakoimaan niiden onnistumista formatiivisen arvioinnin avulla. Näyttää selvältä, että on viisaampaa keskittyä ongelman aiheuttajiin kuin yrittää korjata jo tapahtunutta tuhoa.

Käytämme arvioinneissamme monia erilaisia metodeja. Kokeelliset metodit eivät usein ole mahdollisia tämän tyyppisissä tutkimuksissa, mutta pyrimme kvantifioimaan tuloksia siinä määrin kuin mahdollista. Koska monissa GEF:n ohjelmissa kohteena on vaikkapa maankäyttö tai kasvillisuus, olemme kehittäneet tapoja käyttää kaukokartoitusta ja paikkatietojärjestelmiä mittaamaan muutosta. Näitä voi yhdistää sosioekonomiseen analyysiin. Mitä tahansa metodia käytetäänkin, tärkeintä on systemaattinen analyysi ja triangulaatio.

Miksi arvioinnista on tullut niin tärkeä osa GEF:n toimintaa? Yhtenä syynä on se, että GEF perustettiin olemaan innovatiivinen rahoitusmekanismi, jonka puitteissa voidaan testata uusia, parempia tapoja toimia ympäristön hyväksi. Tällainen kokeellinen lähestymistapa tietysti vaatii, että arviointi on oleellinen osa järjestelmää. Vuosien saatossa arviointi on lisäksi todistanut arvonsa tuottamalla käytännöllistä tietoa toimintamallien tarkoituksiin sekä vastaamalla johtokunnan ja muiden osallistujien tarpeisiin joustavasti ja ajallaan.

Olemme juuri julkaisseet kirjan Environmental evaluation and Global Development Institutions – a case study of the Global Environment Facility, jossa valaisemme näitä asioita tarkemmin GEF:n näkökulmasta. Kirjan esittelytilaisuuden tallenne löytyy GEF:n YouTube -kanavalta.

Originally published by the FInnish Evaluation Society.

There Is No One Solution to Climate Safe Future

Tokyo Dawn (photo: J.I. Uitto)

COP26 is about to start in Scotland and thousands of government and civil society representatives, international organization and private sector types, scientists, journalists, and hangers-on are descending upon the city of Glasgow while the pandemic is still ongoing. In fact, the accommodations in town and its surroundings are already so overbooked that many participants have to stay in Edinburgh, some 40 minutes’ train ride away.

The gathering is the 26th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the hopes are high that, finally, the world leaders will take decisive action to halt global warming. Under President Joe Biden, the Americans are back with a vengeance and UK as the host nation is talking up the game. China, which has surpassed the US as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases (although on per capita basis it is still at a much lower level) has announced ambitious plans that fossil fuels will constitute less than 20% of its energy mix by 2060.

Climate change is real and its impacts are already being felt by the majority of the planet’s population, not least in small islands and places like Bangladesh with low-lying coasts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest assessment gives humanity a dire warning: we have until the end of the decade to mend our ways, lest runaway climate change wreaks havoc on the planet and its inhabitants. Source.

Mind you, the havoc is not anymore in the distant future. In the past couple of years we’ve seen devastating wildfires in Australia, Siberia and the US West Coast. Some of the wealthiest parts of the planet are running out of water, threatening California’s famed citrus groves and forcing cities to ration water. Unprecedented floods took Germany and much of Central Europe by surprise this summer and also caused huge damages in China. Heatwaves are killing people and storms are destroying infrastructure and causing frequent power outages even in places like Texas.

So, surely our leaders see the writing on the wall and will take decisive action. Well, don’t bet your money on it. The hopes were equally high at another climate meeting in Copenhagen twelve years ago where the rich nations promised to deliver US$100 billion a year to combat climate change but little came out of it. Source.

How is it possible, you are asking? Citizens are increasingly concerned and young people are getting literally sick with climate anxiety. Source. Don’t our democratically elected leaders know? Or don’t they care? They know, for sure, and some may even care but there are forces too strong to resist. Of course, big businesses, not least the fossil fuel industry but others as well, continue to spend tremendous amounts of money to spread misinformation and sow the seeds of doubt — and to lobby and provide campaign contributions to politicians without which, at least in the United States, a politician doesn’t stand a chance to get elected or re-elected (in most European countries, such contributions would fall squarely into the category of criminal corruption).

The political decisionmakers in capital cities, as important as they are, can’t do everything. We need action on multiple fronts. The subsidies that governments give to environmentally destructive activities, notably fossil fuels and industrial-scale agriculture that leads to massive deforestation, are magnitudes larger than the moneys they promise (let alone deliver) to fight climate change. The IMF estimates that the global fossil fuel subsidies were US$5.9 trillion in 2020 (about 6.8% of global GDP) and expected to rise to 7.4% of GDP in 2025. Source.

Removing these subsidies and ensuring policy coherence so that environmental policy wouldn’t be there just to patch up the damage done by other sectors would be most important.

Very importantly, we also need to invest in technological solutions to mitigate climate change. These technologies include, obviously, renewable energy and energy efficiency-related ones, but there are many more possible avenues to explore. Many environmentalists tend to emphasize the risks associated with such new technologies, but can we really afford not to include them in the mix?

But it’s also all of us: the citizens — or more accurately, consumers. In the summer of 2020 when the pandemic was still new — oh, how long ago that feels now — there was a growing feeling that maybe this calamity could teach us something. Something about our values, about what is important in life. We realized that our priorities had been misplaced. Getting those new clothes or going on that vacation wasn’t the meaning of life. Sheltering in place, concerned about the health and wellbeing of our loved ones and ourselves, worried about our job security, we missed our friends and families and recognized some inner emptiness.

But that was a lifetime ago. The pandemic lasted too long (actually, it isn’t over yet, as much as we pretend it is) and we got bored. The malls and restaurants opened again. Airplanes started to take off again. Some of us didn’t lose our jobs, after all, or figured out a way to survive without a regular pay-check. So it’s party time — and shopping time! In the US, consumer spending increased by 12% in the second quarter of 2021. Our greatest worry now is not a virus, but bottlenecks in supply chains that prevent us from having everything we want as quickly and cheaply as we want it. After all, we deserve it, after the terrible lockdown.

We are told that to combat climate change, we have to make sacrifices. Many environmental activists urge us to stop driving and flying, stop consuming meat because industrial-scale cattle ranching is a leading cause of tropical deforestation (alongside soybeans and palm oil, the latter of which is ubiquitous in our daily lives). This doesn’t of course apply only to everyone in London and Los Angeles, Helsinki and Hamburg. It would be equally important for the people in Chengdu and Chongqing who have just recently become rich enough to add meat to their poor diets. And in Ulaanbaatar where they, in their harsh climate, have for generations fed themselves with meat from the yak, horses, sheep. If you take that away, it’s pretty much potatoes that’s left for them.

Let’s get real. The truth is, even if everyone on the planet suddenly — and highly improbably — turned vegan, it won’t stop climate change. We’re not going to stop flying either, as witnessed by the case of the thousands who are flying to Glasgow for the climate meetings. Then there are all the poor people in the world, both in the global South and the North, who cannot reasonably be expected to make any sacrifices. Putting the onus on individuals to stop climate change and environmental degradation is both ineffective and unfair. To quote the MacArthur Fellow Saul Griffith, “People want to see themselves in the solution, but not at the expense of sacrificing the things they love and the conveniences of modern life.” Source. The importance lies in changing the mindsets, so that people demand change in the system.

We should, of course, fly less than we used to. In 2019, before the pandemic, there were 3 billion airline passengers in the world (naturally, many of them frequent fliers). That is an obscene number. The only way we can reduce it is by raising prices, to reflect the real costs, of unsubsidized fuel and internalized environmental costs. But then flying would again become the privilege of the wealthy, like it used to be. But it seems that it has become a human right for anyone that can scrape together a few dollars or euro for a discount ticket to crowd to an airport and fight over an ever-shrinking seat in a pressurized tube hurtling through the skies for a weekend of fun. A human right, just like the 4-dollar t-shirt and 12-dollar jeans produced by a brown woman near-blind by the age of 25 from bad lighting and toxic fumes.

Which brings me to environmental justice. Climate impacts — just like the impacts of the pandemic — hit first and hardest the least privileged among us. Those living in the developing countries with fewest resources and opportunities. The same people who crowd at the US southern border with Mexico or who try to find a passage to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. In the rich countries, too, the ones at the bottom of the social and economic pyramid are the hardest hit. There is no doubt that climate change and environmental degradation have a social justice dimension.

But addressing the environmental justice issue is not going to stop the climate from changing, like some activists would have us believe. Even if we taxed the rich heavily, as we should (in a globalized world, this would require global coordination and concerted action by every country), there are still more than 2 billion people living in abject poverty in the world. Their number may have increased by as many as 150 million because of the pandemic. Lifting their incomes so that they can consume adequately for a dignified life must be a priority.

Kate Raworth has put forth the attractive model of doughnut economics, which places all humanity within an acceptable range in terms of standard of living. Source. No-one is left in the doughnut hole, while no-one should be allowed to consume beyond the outer layer of the ring. But with 8 billion people, and counting, on the planet, this still puts huge strains on the environment, especially at current technological levels.

Of course, we must measure wealth differently. Gross Domestic Product, GDP, is most outdated and most destructive a meter, given that it doesn’t give any value to the natural environment, except as raw material even if it is depleted, and hardly any to social capital. The Dasgupta Review published by the UK Government earlier this year makes this fundamental failure in economic thinking clear and calls for integrating nature into the economic calculus. Source. Irrespective of how we measure wealth, however, a dignified human life requires resources and energy, for food, for shelter, for mobility, for stimulation.

Energy is a critical factor. It is needed for all human endeavors: for construction, transportation, heating, cooling, manufacturing. The Internet uses extraordinary amounts of energy, as do all appliances that we have at home and in our pockets. Cryptocurrencies are extremely destructive in their energy use, to the point that China banned their mining. Source. There have been decades of promises of how solar and wind energy will provide abundant cheap and clean energy, but despite sinking costs this has not yet taken off at adequate scale. Partly it is due to continued fossil fuel subsidies, but not entirely. Still the advances in renewable energies have been remarkable. Much more technological advances will be needed in heating and cooling.

Any old way I look at it, there is always something missing in the equation. We have to hope that our leaders, whether democratically elected or not, have the wisdom and courage to take some real steps in Glasgow, which they will follow up with concrete actions afterwards. The best they could do, I believe, would be to agree to remove public subsidies to actions that harm the environment, including fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. This would more than offset the missing finance to climate action.

We all should think twice about our own consumption, minimize waste and act responsibly as citizens. But we can’t leave stopping climate change to individuals. That’s neither possible nor fair, when the system is stacked against us. Furthermore, we can’t expect poor people around the world to stop aspiring to a better life (even if some may consider such aspirations misguided) just because we in the North have overshot our own share of the common good.

And don’t count on a global revolution. It’s not going to happen anytime soon. And if it does, it’s not going to be pretty. It may only happen because of too many people dying of climatic hazards and conflicts. Anyway, where revolutions have taken place in the past, the results have been at best mixed. Russia and China today are among the most polluted countries in the world. China at least is actively trying to do something about it and may have a decent chance, not least because it can mobilize its resources behind a unified cause under state leadership.

The only way out of this mess is, I believe, through mobilizing all means towards mitigating climate change, adapting to it, and enhancing society’s and people’s resilience against its impacts.

Which brings me back to technology. Many environmentalists are inherently skeptical about technological solutions, whether they be carbon capture or geoengineering or, of course, nuclear energy. It is true that there are risks involved and some of the risks may be severe. These have to be studied carefully and any technologies have to be deployed judiciously. Concerns about the risks are entirely legitimate but at the same time we know the risks of not addressing climate change and environmental degradation.

Some of the objections are more of an ethical nature, as if taking technological solutions to climate change somehow absolved humanity from its sins. As if having a good life and consuming energy in themselves were a moral hazard, even if they didn’t result in environmental damage. Are we better people if we wash our hair with cold water? This type of logic appeals to the converted but risks pushing away many others.

Morals aside, the bottom line is that behavior change even if it were to happen globally and immediately (which is not likely) will not save the planet. Nor will the Nationally Determined Voluntary Contributions towards the Paris Agreement goals, even if all countries lived up to their promises (which they are unlike to do). Source.

To give us the best chance to a decent future we need advanced technologies in the mix. And we urgently need investments in research and development. Such investments will require public-private partnerships and financing through tax revenues from both corporations and individuals. Those are the kinds of sacrifices we need to make for our common future. It’s too late to rely on one set of strategies alone.

Note: This article has been revised following feedback from several readers, which made it clear to me that the original argument was not made clearly enough.

Published at Medium.

Evaluation in an Uncertain World: Complexity, Legitimacy and Ethics - An Interview

Evaluation in an Uncertain World: Complexity, Legitimacy and Ethics, 6-10 September 2021 – An interview with Juha Uitto, Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the Global Environment Facility

This interview was given in connection with the European Evaluation Society conference and published originally on the EES website on 26 August 2021.

Evaluating Environment in International Development: New Open Access Edition

 We live in a rapidly changing world although we don’t always notice it as our lives unfold in the midst of these changes. Only when you think back, even only a few years, to a specific time and you compare how life was then, do you notice how different it is now. I had this epiphany when I worked on the new revised edition of Evaluating Environment in International Development. The book was originally published in 2014—only seven years ago—so I was somewhat surprised and distinctly pleased when the publisher approached me for an update. At the time of its publishing, the book had been quite unique in its specific focus on how evaluation of international development programs incorporated the environment. Since then, the need for evaluating the results and effectiveness of environmental interventions has only grown.

As I started updating the work, I realized how much had happened in the intervening years. Today there is hardly anyone who doesn’t recognize global environmental degradation as a terrifying problem affecting our future and the future of coming generations. Climate change, in the words of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, has become the defining issue of our time. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist, is now a recognized leader of a movement calling for urgent action to halt climate change, perhaps reflecting the fact that a large share of kids in Sweden and elsewhere suffer from what has been termed climate anxiety. The effects of climate change are increasingly undeniable, with unprecedented wildfires raging from Australia to the Pantanal, from Siberia to California; and fierce hurricanes and typhoons battering coastlines of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.

While the human and financial costs of these disasters skyrocket, we are losing more biodiversity than ever since the mass extinctions before humans inhabited the planet. Climate change contributes to this devastation, but the root causes of biodiversity loss are in human activity that destroys habitats through deforestation, agricultural expansion, extensive animal husbandry, mining and natural resource extraction, and urbanization. These same forces that have brought us in ever closer communion with non-human animals, have brought us the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by a zoonotic virus that has spilled over to humans. We also face a third environmental crisis, that of pollution and waste that threatens both human and ecosystem health, not least the living ocean. We need to know how best to tackle these existential problems informed by evaluative evidence.

The good news is that there has been an awakening, of sorts. Many important milestones have been reached since the publication of the original book. The Paris Climate Agreement has been ratified by a vast majority of countries in the world. The Sendai Framework was created to galvanize action for disaster risk reduction, acknowledging that climate change is one of the main drivers. And then there are the Sustainable Development Goals that recognize that development must balance the social, environmental, and economic to produce positive outcomes for the people, planet and prosperity. These are all great initiatives but without implementation, without true commitment by all sectors of society, they will add up to too little too late. We see positive signs of real change. Countries have set targets for reaching carbon neutrality at specific dates: the United States in 2050, China a decade later. Enlightened business leaders have understood that there are no profits to be made on a devastated planet. Renewable energy is becoming increasingly competitive and major car makers have set timetables to phase out the internal combustion engine.

Earlier this year, the Dasgupta Review was released by the UK Government, making a strong case for changing how we measure success. Economic calculations must start to account fully for the costs of environmental degradation. Before this happens, there is little hope that change will be more than a greenwash. For the first time in its 30-year history, UNDP’s Human Development Index included planetary pressures in its calculations, clearly showing how the countries that measure at the highest levels of human development do so at the cost of unsustainable use of natural resources.

This all demonstrates how the environmental agenda is also a social justice agenda. The rich countries continue to overstretch the planetary boundaries denying the poorer countries opportunities. It is also the poorest people, including in the rich countries, that are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts and suffer most from pollution and environmental degradation. These are the people—and their ranks include disproportionally minorities and women—whose health, lives and livelihoods are most at risk.

The importance and appreciation of evaluation continue to increase, for there is a recognition that we must better understand what policies, strategies, programs and projects are effective in addressing these pressing challenges. We only have limited time to move towards a more sustainable path before the window closes, before climate change and environmental degradation lead to major societal destabilization on a global scale. We must ensure that we learn from the past efforts what has worked, for whom, under what circumstances. One size does not fit all, clearly, and global “best practices” are elusive. All interventions take place in specific contexts where social, economic, historical, geographical, cultural, and institutional factors interact in complex ways. Successful approaches to policymaking, programming, and evaluation must be sensitive to context and gauge the impacts, both intended and unintended, on different groups of people as well as the environment.

The second edition of Evaluating Environment in International Development brings together contributions from 22 evaluation thinkers and practitioners who reflect on their experiences from work with major international organizations, civil society, private sector and academia. They share their accumulated wisdom in 16 chapters that cover topics from the conceptual to the practical, based lessons from the field. There is no preferred approach or methodology; on the contrary, the complex challenges and varied situations require a broad range of approaches to evaluation, from quantitative and quasi-experimental, including the use of remote sensing and geospatial techniques, to qualitative. The cases covered range from program evaluation to evaluating policy and normative work. Examples highlighted come from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. To be accessible to as many readers as possible, especially those from these regions and younger readers, the book is available as an open access publication free of charge.

It is my sincere hope that the book will provide food for thought about how to utilize evaluation even more as an important tool for better policy development and programming. And I hope it will help inspire new ideas for improved evaluation practice that can help us tackle the pressing problems of environment and development.

Originally published on Earth-Eval.

Integrating Environmental and Social Impact into Evaluations

by David Todd & Juha Uitto

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the attendant Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) all recognize the close interlinkages of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. The pandemic that we’re living through demonstrates this in a concrete and drastic manner. Not only has the pandemic caused a health crisis, it has wreaked havoc on the global economy and revealed huge social clefts in societies. Moreover, the corona virus causing the pandemic is zoonotic and its emergence has been facilitated by the unsustainable exploitation of the natural environment by human society. It has also demonstrated in no uncertain terms that we humans are still part of the natural world, and that human health and ecosystem health are closely intertwined.

In 2019, the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) established a Working Group on Integrating Environmental and Social Impact into Evaluations Its objective is to establish a common UN-wide approach, norms and standards for appropriately incorporating environmental and social considerations into all evaluations, in line with the UN system-wide effort to move towards a common approach to environmental and social standards for UN programming.

The Working Group first conducted a stocktaking of the policies and guidance of UNEG members in support of evaluating the environment and social considerations. The study consisted of a collection and review of evaluation policies and guidance documents of UNEG members, and a survey that was administered to the evaluation offices. A total of 40 documents from 39 agencies were collected and analyzed, and 29 full sets of survey responses from agencies were received.

So what did we find? The importance placed on social and environmental considerations depends on the extent to which the agencies define their mandates to cover these areas. Having said that, both areas are generally seen as important. In all, 70% of the agencies feel that their work is highly engaged with social aspects and 45% think so about the environment. Overall, social considerations have a higher profile than those of the environment, but almost all agencies also report medium- or high-level engagement with the latter.

In keeping with the importance of these considerations, almost 60% of agencies reported having environmental or social safeguard policies, which need to be applied during the preparation of projects or programs, which then provide an entry point for evaluations to address these issues.

The agencies of course have their unique mandates, which can be highly specialized requiring appropriate evaluation methods. To meet their needs, almost all agencies have developed their own evaluation guidelines, tailored to the specifics of the work they undertake. One might assume that such guidance would adequately cover the social and environmental considerations from their perspective, but this is often not the case. In fact, based on survey results, 68% of responding evaluation offices feel that social considerations have not been well addressed, and as many as 84% feel this to be the case for environmental aspects. The survey results show a highly consistent perception among UNEG members that there is a need for additional guidance, particularly in the area of the environment. However, in terms of the precise areas that should be included, a less clear picture emerges.

Although social considerations are much more widely covered in existing guidance than environmental ones are, there are still gaps. Gender receives the strongest attention, a situation to which UNEG is said to have made an important contribution through its document “Integrating Human Rights and Gender Equality in Evaluation: Towards UNEG Guidance” . Human rights, the other major thrust of UNEG’s work, are also present, but tend to be bundled with gender and are often not addressed in as much detail.  Other social considerations have received much less attention. Examples of areas that would require more consideration and clarity in how they can be covered in evaluations include vulnerability; poverty (interestingly, given that poverty is such a central mandate for the UN); indigenous peoples; and disability (an area in which UNEG is now investing).

Guidance on the environment was found to be limited and inadequate for both current and emerging needs, a fact that should not surprise anyone. This was confirmed by both the document review and the survey. Specific areas that were identified as priorities where guidance would be needed included: (not unexpectedly) climate change (which now often tends to be the primary environmental concern on people’s minds); environmental impacts of development projects and how to minimize environmental footprints of interventions; and environmental risks. These latter are obviously central issues for mainstreaming environment into development processes as well as evaluation.

On a very positive note, a broad range of agencies realize that their activities may have unanticipated environmental effects. This in fact should be the basic assumption, as it seems safe to say that anything we do will have some environmental impact. There is also a heightened awareness of the interactions between social and environmental factors, clearly driven by the SDGs’ explicit emphasis on these interlinkages.

There’s also a clear recognition that individual agencies are not best positioned to produce guidance on all aspects. UNEG’s work on gender and human rights is generally very well regarded and has been widely used, so agencies see it as a clear model for further work in the environmental and other social areas as well. The advantages of developing guidance through UNEG include its institutional neutrality; the guidance can also be more detailed in specific areas than most agencies would be able to produce; and it can address common needs identified by a broad range of agencies.

The Working Group continues its work. It currently has members from 13 agencies, coordinated by the GEF, jointly with UNEP and UNIDO. We plan to develop tiered guidance for UNEG members to integrate environmental and social impact into their evaluations building upon good practices identified in current agency-specific guidelines and evaluations that have successfully applied a holistic perspective. It is worth noting that our target is particularly evaluations where the evaluand is not an environmental program or a specific social issue. The purpose is thus to achieve mainstreaming of environmental and social dimensions into all evaluations in the spirit of sustainable development.

Originally published on Earth-Eval. 

The Jazz that Passed

Blue Swamini in January 2020 (photo by author)

That 2020 was a bad year goes without saying. One of the areas of human endeavor that suffered most was arts and culture. And these are also amongst the most vital areas for us. In a year dominated by a pandemic and a health crisis (which is fundamentally an expression of how our human society has an unhealthy relationship with nature), social and political strife, closures of small businesses and rising unemployment, police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of right-wing violence and white supremacy, and the sad farce of an increasingly mad president in the United States, it’s easy to overlook how important a role music and other arts play in our wellbeing.

As countries and cities locked down in the spring, museums, galleries, concert halls and live music venues boarded up as well. I personally had planned to have an active year of music and cultural events. In fact, it all started off well. In January, I managed to first catch the Beijing Bamboo Orchestra (a Chinese ensemble that features more than 30 instruments all made of bamboo) and then saw the Kassa Overall Blue Swamini, a fabulous and innovative band with the unusual set-up of harp, vibes, bass and drums, also featuring the vocalist Carmen Lundy. In early-February, I was delighted to witness the performance of composer and bassist Linda May Han Oh’s work Aventurine for strings and a jazz quartet. All of these interesting and elevating events at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.

While there is no doubt the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Opera and other major venues around the world will bounce back—they have the resources to bridge over these tough times and their patrons will be eager to come back—I am frankly terribly worried about smaller live music venues and clubs. Many have already closed down and many of them, I fear, permanently. In August, we lost one of the best clubs in Washington, DC, Twins Jazz, which had operated for 33 years on U Street. One of the biggest losses for the jazz scene in New York (and the world) was the closure of Jazz Standard, another well-established club, which featured nightly many of the city’s best talent, often of the more progressive variety creating new and innovative music. 

Then there were those who died of COVID-19. The first one I took note of early in the pandemic was Manu Dibango, who passed on March 24 in his adopted city, Paris. The Cameroonian saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist was highly influential in mixing African music with funk and jazz. His best known piece was probably the 1972 hit Soul Makossa. Dibango was 86.

The last day of March witnessed the passing of Wallace Roney (59), a protégé of Miles Davis and a remarkable trumpeter in his own right. Three decades ago, Roney was one of the “Young Lions” who wanted to bring back the glory of modern jazz from earlier days. There was a lot of Miles in his playing, as can be heard in the recording of Metropolis from 2018, but he was definitely his own man. One of the top trumpeters in his generation and beyond.

On April 1st, world lost the pianist Ellis Marsalis who died of pneumonia triggered by COVID at the age of 85. Apart from being a musician, Ellis Marsalis was an important music educator in New Orleans where his legacy lives on in the Ellis Marsalis Center. His legacy is also evident in his four sons, Winton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason who have become household names as jazz masters. 

The guitarist John “Bucky” Pizzarelli died on the same day at the age of 94. Pizzarelli was a highly skillful guitarist who had performed with luminaries such as Benny Goodman, Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra and recorded with pop musicians ranging from Paul McCartney and Michael Franks to Aretha Franklin and Carly Simon. Both presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton invited him to perform at the White House. He also performed frequently with his son, guitarist John Pizzarelli. 

Onaje Allan Gumbs may not have been a household name, but he was a highly established pianist whose music inspired me as a teenager in Finland. Gumbs died in New York on April 6th at 70. 

Then ten days later, on April 15th, the world lost two great senior statesmen of modern jazz. Lee Konitz passed away from COVID-related pneumonia at the age of 92. It is impossible to capture the importance of Lee Konitz in a paragraph. He was one of the greatest and most original alto saxophone players of all time. He was born in Chicago to a Jewish immigrant family and started his professional career with dance and blues bands in the Windy City in 1944. He moved to New York City in 1947 and soon performed and recorded with greats, such as Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Lenny Tristano, Stan Kenton and Bill Evans. His trademark was an alto sound that was pure and his expression was devoid of anything beyond the musical essential. He recorded the last album of his incredibly productive career, Old Songs New, in 2017 just after his 90th birthday. 

All of these deaths are tragedies, of course, but one that made me saddest was that of Henry Grimes who passed away in Harlem on the same day as Konitz at the age 84. From the late-1950s, Grimes was an active participant on the jazz scene, playing with greats such as Coleman Hawkins. However, he made his mark especially as part of the free jazz movement with others including Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry. He fell on hard times in 1968 when his bass broke on a tour with Jon Hendricks. Henry was left stranded, broke and without an instrument in Los Angeles where he stayed working as janitor until 2003 when he was discovered by a social worker who luckily recognized the great musician. He made a celebrated comeback on the New York music scene where jazz aficionados had never forgotten about him. He was a warm and open person and even I managed to connect with him on social media.

The list goes on and I could add so many names, but here I have only focused on those firmly in the jazz world. Just to pay my respects to others, here are some: Trini Lopez, Kenny Rogers (who, incidentally, was a jazz bassist before he found fame as a country star), the renowned bass guitarists Matthew Seligman and Adam Schlesinger, Dave Greenfeld of the Stranglers, John Prine, Alan Merrill (best know as the co-writer of ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’), and the composer William Pursell.

A totally unnecessary casualty of the pandemic was the Japanese pianist Tadataka Unno who was badly beaten by a bunch of thugs upon entering the subway in New York City in September. While the details of the attack are blurry, there is reason to believe that this was a racist attack as he remembers his attackers calling him Chinese. One of the many unfortunate side effects of the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump who insisted on calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.” 

These have all been terrible losses to the music world. But apart from those who died, many more have seen their livelihoods disappear. Behind this is also the greater change in how music is consumed. With the shift to streaming, musicians can no longer make a living wage through recordings—and there are so many people who, quite inexplicably, think that music should be free and who do their best to avoid paying even the paltry fees that services like Spotify and Pandora would transfer partly to the artist (can you imagine people suddenly deciding that farmers or doctors should not get paid for their work because they “enjoy” it and provide something that is good for the world?). All of this is very bad for musicians, especially those who create a novel kind of music that doesn’t get millions of instances of airplay. But that’s another story for another time.

The closing of live music venues and concert sites and the halting of tours has left countless musicians with very little possibilities of earning an income. There are some creative ideas around, of course. I’ve personally contributed to a number of music projects through crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter. Live music has been partially reinvented through live streaming from artists’ homes and some clubs. One of my favorites, the fabulous pianist Yoko Miwa, for example, has shared a lot of music from her home in Boston.

Here in DC, the Kennedy Center streams concerts, as do clubs like our premier jazz and supper club Blues Alley and New York’s famed Blue Note. I listen to these events on occasion—and always make a point of paying the “entrance fee” even it would be easy to skip it. The fabled New Orleans club Tipitina’s broadcasts live music from the club in as realistic manner as possible. According to the current owners of the club, members of the jam band Galactic, the silver lining is that very few people could actually get a place in the front row if they were physically at the club, while at home we can all have that experience. I guess one could also turn the heater and the space humidifier on full blast, grab a few beers, and let go at home—at least until the neighbors complain. 

The spontaneity of live performances can be created this way and you can still hear new music, but obviously the experience is different both to the listener and the performers who will miss the feedback from a live audience. As Jimmy Page, the legendary guitarist and founder of Led Zeppelin, said in a recent NME interview: “I will never be one of those people who’ll record alone and send someone a file. I never went into music in the first place to do that, it was for playing together and this is what it means.” He states his conviction that “music means nothing without live shows.” 

As long as we need social distancing because of the pandemic, seeing performances online is better than nothing. Apart from the US and UK, some other countries around the world, like New Zealand, Japan and Finland, have been somewhat less severely hit due to better policies and a more disciplined population. There, live music may make a comeback sooner, although tightly packed enthusiastic crowds will remain risky for a long while. Eventually, this current pandemic will wane and we’ll all get vaccinated (worryingly, there is a large proportion of population hesitant to take the vaccine). Although it may take years before we can again mingle freely in crowded places—and there are other novel viruses lurking in nature waiting to spill over to humans as we continue to abuse the environment—there is hope that live music will come back.

But the likelihood is that most of the venues that have now closed will not reopen, as the operators have moved on and reopening would require a lot of money in a situation that remains highly uncertain. Furthermore, there has been a movement of people away from city centers during the pandemic and that, obviously, is bad news for clubs that depend on dense concentrations of customers. 

The website of Jazz Standard in New York has an upbeat message: We’ll be together again! I believe that there are millions of people around the world who feel the same. That should be our best hope.