Seite - (000065) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

evaluation community tends to keep its distance from the ex ante evaluators, as there iswidespread concern that any involvement of ex post evaluators in ex ante evaluationwill lead toaconflictof interestwhen theactivityneeds tobeevaluated lateron. Ifdesignandimplementationcharacteristicsweredecideduponbecauseof anexanteevaluation’soutcomes, anexpost evaluatorwould in factbe required to evaluate his or her own judgments in the ex ante evaluation. In actual practice the two communities of practice hardly mingle. Ex ante evaluators have their own conferences and their own literature and good practice standards.What Fig. 3.1 shows is that they are the first to delve into the question of impact and aim to provideevidence,even ifhypothetical at that stage, forwhatan interventionwould set out to do. During implementationmonitoring and evaluation often becomemanagement tools. If the project needs to be steered through difficult circumstances and react adequately to changes, it needs to set up an adequate monitoring system, either collecting its owndata or using data fromavailable statistical services. Relatively newis the inclusionof real timeevaluation,whichon impact tends to take the form of randomizedcontrolled trials thatneed tobe included in thedesignof theproject and need to be adhered to during implementation, in order to come to valid conclusions about the causal mechanism tested out. Other evaluations during implementation (such as mid-term evaluations) tend to look at processes and efficiency and are not represented in this matrix. Randomized controlled trials tend to be “local” in nature; rarely will we see RCTs at the national level and evenmore rarelyat the regional level, as theywouldbecomeverycostly to reacha sufficient level of data (large “n”) to allow for conclusions at that level. In the ex post columnswe tend to see two varieties of evaluation that provide impact evidence. First of all, end-of-project evaluations may present results of experiments or provide data on impact; usually these evaluations also contain Fig. 3.1 The time and spacedimensions of demand for impact evidence (Source:Author) 3 Mainstreaming ImpactEvidence inClimateChange andSustainableDevelopment 45