Colombia’s journey in sustainability-inclusive evaluation: Insights from the first country-led Footprint Evaluation

By Leonie Kalchthaler, Anna Warnholz, E. Jane Davidson, Jeff Vargas-González, Elixon F. Nanclares & Thomaz K. Chianca

In the face of today’s environmental crisis, many countries are striving to translate their Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) commitments into concrete, evidence-based policies. Achieving this requires evaluation that is ‘sustainability-inclusive’, viewing the evaluation of environmental sustainability as a core component, not an optional add-on. The Footprint Evaluation Initiative has been a leading source of cutting-edge, practical guidance on how to make evaluations sustainability-inclusive, even when working within tight budgets and timelines.

The Colombian Department of National Planning (DNP) is the first government entity anywhere in the world to pilot the application of Footprint Evaluation’s innovative tools and guidance within a country-led sustainability-inclusive evaluation. This effort was a joint collaboration between the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval), the Footprint Evaluation Initiative, and the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) through its implementing partner, the Center for Learning on Evaluation and Results for Lusophone Africa and Brazil (CLEAR-LAB).

DEval and GEI supported the Footprint Evaluation Initiative to work alongside DNP to commission and manage the environmental sustainability components of the evaluation. This included advising on:

1. selecting a suitable evaluation project
2. commissioning an evaluation team with the right mix of knowledge and skills
3. supporting DNP to work with the external evaluation team on the methodological approach
4. helping identify existing evidence and develop evidence capture instruments
5. data analysis, drawing evaluative conclusions, and data visualization
6. reporting, utilization, and learning

DNP contracted an evaluation partnership between Ipsos (a global market research and consulting firm) and Yobiplex (IT system experts), who were also joined by environmental sustainability experts from CarbonBox, to conduct an evaluation of the Colombian government’s IT systems.

The evaluation explored sustainability-related questions within an assessment of IT systems, covering 110 government entities and focusing on four important environmental dimensions:

• Energy consumption and related Greenhouse gas emissions
• Water consumption
• Electronic waste management and circularity
• General sustainability practices

Footprint Evaluation principles, methodologies, and tools were adapted with support from Footprint Evaluation and applied by the environmental sustainability experts. To assess the environmental sustainability of the government entities' practices on the four dimensions listed above, the evaluation team made good use of the Footprint Evaluation Typology (a tool that provides a simple, structured way to make clear evaluative judgments about impacts on natural systems), rubrics methodology, and qualitative and quantitative survey interview evidence.

The evaluation team also conducted detailed case studies of three IT systems housed within DNP using a mix of quantitative data, life cycle assessments (LCAs), and qualitative interviews. In those analyses, the evaluation team estimated the IT systems’ carbon footprints, water consumption, and e-waste outputs / equipment lifespan of equipment and peripherals.

This experience has yielded valuable insights for governments, other organizations, and evaluators interested in embedding environmental and sustainability dimensions into evaluation practice.

Five key learnings from Colombia’s experience:

1. Integrating sustainability within existing resources: With the guidance from the Footprint Evaluation team, the evaluation team successfully incorporated environmental sustainability into the evaluation without increasing its budget. By strategically reframing the evaluation’s scope and methodological approach, DNP was able to cover usability, efficiency, and sustainability. This was achieved through minor adjustments to the Colombian government’s standard evaluation procedures and by using cost-effective approaches that delivered credible and useful answers to the evaluation questions without conducting unnecessarily deep analyses on the environmental aspects.
2. Broader and more meaningful conclusions: Including sustainability considerations led to more comprehensive and valid findings, better aligned with Colombia’s sustainability agenda and the SDGs. The evaluation combined the Footprint Evaluation Typology with a rubrics-based approach to provide clear, actionable conclusions.
3. Adapting to data-scarce contexts: Facing fragmented and incomplete environmental data for IT systems, the evaluation team developed flexible methodological solutions that shifted the focus from seeking perfect quantitative information towards generating credible, timely insights. Building on life cycle assessment principles, they combined approximations, expert input, targeted surveys, and extensive interviews. Customized rubrics based on the Footprint Evaluation Typology were created to analyze the survey responses to 10 sustainability-relevant questions from the 110 government entities. This methodological adaptability allowed the team to assess sustainability dimensions even with limited data, strengthening the quality of the findings and demonstrating a scalable, replicable model for sustainability-inclusive evaluations in other contexts.

4. Building institutional capacity: Targeted capacity development proved essential to the evaluation’s success. The evaluation followed a learning-by-doing model that combined webinars and workshops with Footprint Evaluation experts, who also provided hands-on support at key junctures of the evaluation process. By bringing together government officials, Colombian technical experts and evaluation consultants, the capacity strengthening workshops fostered a collaborative learning environment that strengthened institutional knowledge and confidence. As a result, DNP is now better equipped to implement sustainability-inclusive evaluations on an ongoing basis.
5. From instrumental to conceptual use: The goal of sustainability-inclusive evaluation is not just to improve the current initiative (instrumental use of the evaluation), but to create a fundamental shift in how decision makers think about sustainability (conceptual use of the evaluation). Beyond improving IT systems, the evaluation fostered deeper insights among decision makers that they can use to inform future decisions. One key insight—that 80% of greenhouse gas emissions are produced in supply chains rather than operations—highlighted procurement as a powerful lever for reducing environmental impact across government-procured products and services.

Colombia’s pilot demonstrates how international partnerships can foster innovative, country-led evaluation approaches that are practical, scalable, and designed to tackle today's interconnected global challenges.

The full evaluation report and an infographic (both in Spanish) are available on the Sinergia website.