In the SDG Era, What are the Key Questions for the Evaluation Community?
Reflections of an in-depth discussion about how development is changing, and what the implications are for evaluation.
Reflections of an in-depth discussion about how development is changing, and what the implications are for evaluation.
By: Caroline HeiderThe ambitious, multi-layered and interconnected agenda demands from policy-makers and practitioners that they think and act systemically, manage in and for a dynamic and complex world, and realize positive synergy while countering potential negative outcomes. At the same time, simple and pragmatic solutions are needed that work at local levels.
Last week, I traveled to the United Kingdom to take part in a special event hosted by Wilton Park, an institution that provides a platform for thinkers, policy-makers, and practitioners to discuss current issues. As one of the guest speakers, I was invited to contribute to a session on Revisiting independence, objectivity and the critically reflective role of evaluation for the SDG era.
The organizers asked us to reflect on how development is changing and what trends deserve examination; how these trends affect our institutions and evaluation functions; and what the implications are for independent evaluation.
In responding, I covered three areas and their implications:
There are many intricate technical issues that arise from each of the SDGs. And, there is the overall lament about the number of goals and targets. Instead of reviewing each of them, I found it more important to focus on higher level issues that stand out:
Embedded in these three issues are forceful tensions that will need to understood and balanced.
The 2015 Addis meeting on finance for development (F4D) was timely; it preceded the SDG summit and set out an interesting agenda that clarified:
Here, I am thinking of the many transformational forces that are at play, such as climate change, a densely interrelated financial system susceptible to shocks, and pandemics. While the world has always been a complex system, instability in one of these (or other) domains can easily transmit to the other, and often spreads from country to regions or globally. Likewise, disruptive technology is a transformational force which can bring much needed innovations, but will also force other changes. For instance, artificial intelligence will transform the nature of work and job opportunities at a time when hundreds of millions of job seekers enter the market, and many are ill-equipped for fundamentally different demands on the labor force.
These and other issues combine into formidable challenges for the development community, but also have implications for evaluation in the following ways:
First, in making strategic choices about what to evaluate, we must consider whether lessons from the past will be applicable to the future. For instance, at IEG we are completing an evaluation of carbon finance markets in spite of the fact that these markets collapsed in 2012. The World Bank Group’s history in this sector spans 17 years of work with many lessons that need to be applied as the global community moves from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Accord.
Second, we must innovate how we undertake evaluations, both methodologically and in terms of process:
Third, there is need for systematic outreach, including educating discerning audiences that understand evaluations so that they can assess their quality, and know when and how to use data. This agenda is ever more important in the rise of social media and “alternative facts”.
Finally, increasing domestic public resources will also mean that more and more countries need their own evaluation capacities. A trend that has started 10-15 years ago and is continuing to gain currency. It is an area into which we as the international evaluation community have to invest.
Comments
Many thanks for these…
Many thanks for these insights. The SDGs provide encouraging opportunities to gain new perspectives on evaluation criteria, especially relevance and coherence questions. However, I am concerned about how we are selective in focusing on some new criteria, and nt others. For example the over-arching promise of the longer-term positioning of the UN Development System calls for integration of assets across the Organization and the three pillars of its Charter. However, for example, emerging SDG indicaors are mostly static, rather than guiding the measurement of prograss/change. They ignore and replace certain standing "obligations" of states with inferior "voluntary commitments." The Targets and indicators generally diminish and/or dismiss duties under treaty and peremptory norms of international law, including the existing indicators and data required to meet reporting obligations under Human Rights Treaties, for example. In other ways, the indicators do--and could better--contribute to the monitoring of those obligations. However, the indicator development has evaded the system-wide integrity, higher vantage and policy coherence promised in the longer-term positioning of the UN Development System. We propose a better approach. On the specific evaluation of Agenda 2030 performance related to land, see: SDG Land Indicators:
In Pursuit of Normative Integrity and Policy Coherence with the UN System-wide Approach at: http://www.hlrn.org/news.php?id=p2xnYw==#.WuyNYGwh01Y and PPT: http://www.hlrn.org/img/documents/Land_indicator_initiative_JS_brief.pdf.
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