Seite - (000250) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

13.1 Introduction Climate change is a reality. Although it is important to acknowledge that the evidence of the linkage between rising economic loss of disasters and climate change has not been statistically established (Pielke 2014), changing precipitation and temperature patterns, as well as occasional hydro-meteorological extreme events, suchasfloods, droughts and landslides, havebeenhittingpeopleespecially at the community level, who have to rely on natural resources for their daily substance (GlobalHumanitarian Forum2009). Reflecting the urgency and impor- tanceofclimatechange, thedonorcommunity for thepastdecadehasbeenfunding a number of climate change programmes in developing countries in close collab- orationwith host governments and variousUNagencies.And it is in recent years that their initial implementationcycleshavebeencompletedandsubsequently their ex-post evaluations have been conducted. In themeantime, discussions regarding evaluation practice, its criteria and framework specifically tailored to climate change projects and programmes have taken place, most notably through such communities of practice as Climate-Eval, the International Development Evalua- tionAssociation, andUnitedNationsEvaluationGroup. Discussions in such arena have highlighted a number of difficulties related to evaluatingclimatechangeprojects andprogrammes, includingshifts in theobjects of evaluation, newmetrics, and greater focus on risk, uncertainty and complexity (Picciotto2009).Morespecifically,evaluationofclimatechangeadaptation(CCA) projects and programmes poses a number of difficulties and complications. For example,Valencia (2009) listsfive typesof such features: (1) “success”ofCCAis whennothinghappens; (2) evaluation ofCCAoccurs too early to tellwhether the intervention has successfullywithstood the projected impacts; (3) there are uncer- taintiesof climate scenarios; (4) short-termweather variabilitydisguises effective- ness of adaptationmeasures; and (5) contribution rather than attribution shouldbe emphasized,becauseof thecomplexityof“overalladaptationprocessthat is largely shapedbyexternal factors” (Bours et al. 2014). Even though very few evaluations on CCA have been conducted so far (Feinstein 2009), Uitto (2014) emphasizes the need of the evaluation community to start building“anadequatebodyof evaluative evidence” from this area inorder to synthesize the lessons. 13.2 ApproachandStudyMaterial In light of suchbackground, thepurposeof this paper is to adopt and test a certain philosophical lens, called critical realism, to a meta-analysis of CCA evaluation reports and to show implications of this approach for the current aswell as future CCAprogramming. 236 T.Miyaguchi and J.I.Uitto