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This special issue of New Directions in Evaluation includes discussions of different types of sustainability – sustainable environment, sustainable development, sustainable programs, and sustainable evaluation systems – and a synthesis of these different issues and their implications for transforming evaluation in ways more appropriate for evaluating sustainability.
This chapter from Transformational Evaluation for the Global Crises of Our Times argues for the need to transform evaluation in the light of current environmental crises and sets out the major ways this needs to happen.
This Footprint Evaluation Initiative report describes four 'thought experiments' undertaken as part of this project. The thought experiments involved revisiting a past, real-life evaluation and walking through how this could have been done differently to incorporate considerations of environmental sustainability.
This Evaluation Practice Exchange Seminar was organized by the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) in cooperation with the Footprint Evaluation project of BetterEvaluation and the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI). The session explores how evaluations, where the evaluand is not an environmental program, can take full account of the environment, drawing on practical experiences from the Footprint Evaluation project and considerations from non-environmental agencies.
The key evaluation questions (KEQs) are designed to support the inclusion of environmental sustainability by embedding consideration of the environment in each evaluation question rather than adding environmental considerations as a standalone question.
The Footprint Evaluation project is a co-creation and research project hosted by BetterEvaluation and supported by the Global Evaluation Initiative. It is grounded in the premise that all evaluations should include consideration of environmental sustainability, even when this is not a stated goal of the intervention.
Given the numerous interconnected environmental crises the world faces, there is an urgent need to include consideration of environmental impacts into all evaluations. Footprint evaluation focuses on evaluating the ‘footprint’ that human systems make on natural systems. Importantly, it includes evaluating the potential and actual environmental impacts of interventions that do not have explicit environmental objectives.
Footprint evaluation focuses on the ‘footprint’ that human systems make on natural systems. This requires attention to the nexus between human systems and natural systems. Footprint evaluation is grounded in the premise that all evaluations should include consideration of environmental sustainability, even when this is not a stated goal of the intervention. This is so that decision-making can take into account the potential and actual impacts of planned interventions (projects, programs, policies) on the environment.