Mainstreaming Impact Evidence in Climate Change and Sustainable Development

Abstract

This chapter examines the demand for impact evidence and concludes that this demand goes beyond the experimental evidence that is produced during the lifetime of an intervention through “impact evaluations” as currently the term is used by many in the evidence movement. The demand for evidence of longer term impact at higher levels requires inspiration from an older tradition of impact evaluation and rethinking how the full range of impact evidence can be uncovered in evaluations. This is especially relevant for sustainable development which calls for a balanced approach on societal, economic and environmental issues. Climate change is a good example of this and a theory of change approach serves to identify key questions over time, space and scale to ensure that impact evidence can be found and reported throughout the lifetime of projects, programmes and policies and beyond in ex post impact assessments. Such an approach leads to mainstreaming of impact questions and related evaluation approaches throughout project and policy cycles. This chapter will demonstrate that evidence can be gathered throughout the lifetime of a project and beyond, in different geographic locations from very local to global, at different levels from relatively simple one dimensional interventions to multi-actor complex systems, up to global scales. It will thus argue for mainstreaming impact considerations throughout interventions, programmes and policies and for evaluations to gather evidence where it is available, rather than to focus the search for impact and its measurement on one or two causal mechanisms that are chosen for verification through experimentation.