I-c: Evaluation of climate change and development

Workshop Pitch

Description

The climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges in human history. It is global, rapid, and intensifying. The crisis threatens the preservation and development of natural and human systems. Consequences are enormous ecological, social and economic costs. Developing countries and emerging economies are particularly impacted. Climate and development are closely intertwined.  At the same time, there are still opportunities to bring people and the environment into a sustainable and resilient state.

Therefore, evidence-based decision-making is crucial and urgent to respond to the impacts of climate change. Effective monitoring, evaluation and learning can improve climate change adaptation and mitigation policies and strengthen resilience. Timely and methodologically sound evaluations of climate and development interventions improve the decision-making by governments and development co-operation partners.

However, evaluating climate change mitigation and adaptation interventions is challenging. One key challenge is an incomplete understanding of future changes in climate, socio-economic and ecological systems as well as the interactions between those changes. This is augmented by other challenges such as difficulties in attributing outcomes to specific interventions, shifting baselines and objectives on climate resilience, and long time frames for outcomes and impacts of interventions to unfold.

To address these challenges, evaluation increasingly needs more systematic and rigorous approaches to synthesize existing evidence and fill evidence gaps. This is necessary to provide useful and up-to-date information for better policies and decision-making processes. This workshop draws on comprehensive experiences by the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) in cooperation with international partners including multilateral and bilateral evaluation units as well as global evidence providers, partner countries and universities.

The workshop is interactive, using a sequence of lectures and case studies, practical group work and exchanges among instructors and participants. The objective is to design an evaluation project by the end of the course. The participants will go through numerous modules. These include concepts, interventions, evaluation approaches, designs and methods available to evaluate at the nexus of climate and development. Climate-relevant concepts such as resilience, vulnerability, mitigation and adaptation, loss and damage and transformational change are introduced, including their implications for evaluation. Workshop participants will work with prominent types of climate interventions including nature-based solutions, infrastructure, climate risk insurances and access to green energy (solar power) as case studies. Theory-based approaches are introduced and applied, including reconstructing theories of change as the basis for the theory-testing. Different evaluation designs including case-study-based and macro-quantitative designs are discussed and compared. Relevant evaluation questions on the relevance, coherence, effectiveness, impact, sustainability and equity of climate interventions are discussed. The instructors will introduce cutting-edge and climate-responsive approaches and methods, including evidence syntheses, advanced case studies analysis including survey methodology, climate risk mapping and analysis, vulnerability assessments and geospatial evaluation. The instructors will also take a brief detour and look at relevant indicators for monitoring and evaluation of relevant interventions.

Objectives

The workshop aims to increase participants’ knowledge and skills in evaluating complex climate and development interventions. After the workshop the participants

• are aware of key climate-relevant concepts, types of interventions (projects), as well as their implications when commissioning or conducting (complex) evaluations;
• understand the basics of climate politics, especially through a lens of the role of evaluation in the UN Climate Conference (COP) negotiations;
• know how to commission, design and conduct climate evaluations;
• have a good grasp of approaches and designs to synthesize and incorporate existing knowledge into evaluation and fill evidence gaps;
• have a good overview of intermediate and advanced data collection tools and analysis; and
• are familiar with applying concepts and approaches to evaluate of transformational and just climate interventions.

Recommended for

Evaluators and commissioners.

Level

This is an intermediate level workshop. It is intended for evaluators and commissioners who aim to expand their foundational understanding of evaluation of both climate change mitigation and adaptation interventions or development evaluations in context of increasing vulnerability or climate-related risks.

Prerequisites

The workshop requires foundational knowledge of quantitative and qualitative methods and designs for complex evaluations. For the interactive group work, some first experiences in development project and program evaluation and/or thematic evaluations are advantageous.