Seite - (000127) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

boosted learningwithinUNEPduring the evaluationprocess.However, the length of the evaluation process, due in part to the high quality standards applied by the EvaluationOfficeand the time required for receiving stakeholder comments onall evaluation products, created an important time lag between the data collection phase and the distribution of the draft main report. This had two consequences: information presented in the draft main report was more than 1 year old, and internal stakeholder interest for themain report,when itwas finally sharedwithin UNEP, appeared to be a lot less than it had been for the intermediate evaluation products. The evaluation team decided to cover the cross-cutting Science andOutreach component as part of the three other components andnot separately, as an accept- ablewayofdealingwith thehuman resource and timeconstraintswithin the team. Thiswasfine inprinciple, but as a result, somehighvisibility assessmentproducts developed jointly by different units in UNEP under this component were not included in the project sample, and received therefore an only cursory treatment in the report.This undervalued some importantUNEP-wide efforts andwas also a missedopportunity intermsof learninglessonsfromcross-divisionalcollaboration. While itmight not have been necessary to give the assessment of the Science and Outreachcomponent the same levelofdepthaswasgiven to theothers, oneor two projects from this component shouldhavebeen included in theproject sample. As acknowledged in the evaluation report7 under the section presenting the limitations of the evaluation, the size of the sample of the country case studies (six in total – or only one formost regions)was too small.Despite the logical and practical country selection criteria, this sample could not provide a representative andcrediblepictureofUNEP’s strategic relevanceandperformanceat thecountry level.A larger sample sizewould, however, not havebeenpossiblewithinbudget. An alternative approach could have been to base the country case studies on information collected from a country questionnaire sent over email, more in-depth desk review and interviews via Skype or video-link. A rough cost com- parisonwith the actual approach suggests that about four additional country case studies could have been prepared using this alternative approach, bringing the sample to amore representative twocase studies per region. Asalsonoted in theevaluation report, theevaluationwouldhavebenefited from moreinterviewswithglobalpartnersandkeyinformantsoutsideUNEPwithagood understanding of the global climate change arena. These would have increased diversity andcredibility of views expressed in the evaluation and, possibly, gener- ated more strategic recommendations. With hindsight, though some interesting views from partners were collected, the perception survey was not the most 7UNEP Evaluation Office 2014/2015, Evaluation of the UNEP Sub-programme on Climate Change: Final report. Web link: http://www.unep.org/eou/Portals/52/SPE%20Climate% 20Change.pdf 6 AnAnalytical Framework forEvaluating aDiverseClimateChangePortfolio 109