Page - (000035) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

2.1 Introducing theMicro-MacroParadox:Success at theMicro-levelDoesNotLead toSuccess at theMacro-level? In development economics the question whether aid contributed to economic growth was hotly debated after Mosley (1987, 139ff) identified this as the “micro-macro” paradox.He could not find any statistically significant correlation between development aid and the economic growth rate of recipient countries, taking into account other factors that causegrowth.Mosleydefendedaidnonethe- less, asbenefitsat themicro levelwereoften shown tobesubstantial andessential. Nevertheless, economic growthwas supposed to be the engine of future develop- ment thatwouldmakeaidunnecessary,andifaidwouldnotcontribute toeconomic development, it could turn out to be ineffective in the longer run and not have meaningbeyond just thebenefitsofa specificand localizedprojector intervention. Even if a project has significant short term outcomes, but it did not contribute to economic growth, it could be argued that the sustainability of its benefits are questionable. Asecondmilestone in this discussionwas reached in1998with thepublication of theWorldBank report on “Assessing aid:whatworks,what doesn’t andwhy?” (Dollar and Prichett 1998), which focused on the role of aid in reducing poverty, and rekindled themicro-macroparadoxdiscussion, as it better identifiedwhenaid couldpotentiallycontribute toeconomicgrowth:whencountrieshadgoodpolicies, good governance andmanagement andwell-functioning institutions. The ensuing debate indevelopmenteconomicsrevivedthemicro-macroparadox,until in(2010) Arndt, Jones and Tarp aimed to close the arguments by demonstrating a positive andstatisticallysignificantcausaleffectofaidongrowth inpoorcountriesover the long run. “There is no micro-macro paradox”, they conclude (p. 27). What is interesting in their analysis is that they attribute their success in demonstrating evidence for growth to “methodological advances in the programme evaluation literature”, which have “improved the profession’s capacity to identify causal effects in economicphenomena” (p. 26). Evaluationmethodology thus has helped to solve themicro-macro paradox in development economics, according toArndt, Jones andTarp. Ifweaccept that, let us explorewhether evaluationmethodology is also able to help us in solving the paradox of successful climate change interventions, versus a devastating trend of global warming and associated climate variability that does not appear to be influencedbyclimate change interventions. Theopportunity for a broadperspective on this issue presented itself at the 2nd InternationalConference onEvaluatingClimateChange andDevelopment,where several comprehensive evaluations of Climate Change aid were presented. They offered an opportunity for a meta-analysis of the results of some of the largest public sector efforts to address climate change in developing countries.Of special interest is whether these evaluations offer any hope regarding the micro-macro 14 R.D. vandenBerg andL.Cando-Noordhuizen