Page - (000042) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

“single greatest risk” to the sustainability of theREDDþ initiatives. Important to note is that greater coherence and consistency has been achieved in measuring greenhouse gas emission reductions – the deciding factor no doubt was that this supportwassetupasclimatechangesupport fromthebeginning(seeLTS,p.xxx). The picture emerging from theNorwegian evaluation is complemented by the independent evaluation of theUN-REDDþprogramme, undertaken in 2014. This evaluationconcludes that theprogrammehasbeenmoderately successful indeliv- eringoutputs,whereas itsoverall (programme)effectiveness is ratedasmoderately unsatisfactory (Frechette 2014, p. iv). Its efficiency is rated as unsatisfactory: the three UN partners in UN-REDDþ continue to have their separate procedures, which leads to inefficiency in themanagementof theprogramme(Frechette,p.30). Wemay draw the following conclusions from this overview of the findings of the sevencomprehensiveevaluations,whicharepresented inTable2.1First of all, threeconditionsat theportfolio levelemergeforanevaluation tobeable toprovide evidence of direct impact andof impact at the global level: 1. Only funding agencies that have steadily built a coherentportfolio focusedon climate change can expect evaluative evidence on the impact of this portfolio; portfolio’s that are gathered from interventions with other aims as primary objective tend to show a lack of data related to climate change, different interpretationsofwhat shouldbedoneandawider rangeofactivities toachieve outputs. 2. The portfolio needs to be coherent andmature to find solid evidence of direct impact; this is thecase for theGEFonly.TheUN-REDDþevaluationmanaged to gather evidenceon the “likelihood”of impact and sustainability. 3. Only theGEF andUN-REDDþ have a consistent set of instructions formea- suringgreenhouse gas emission reductions. These instructions are still under development and will no doubt further improve over time; but they make it possible toaggregateGHGreductionsat theportfolio level.The IDB,ADBand the Swiss Cooperation evaluations faced difficulties for usingGHG reduction data because of the lack of coherence in the portfolio, with interventions now counted as important for climate changewhichwerenot set up for this purpose originally.Even though their portfolios aremature, theydonot lend themselves toprovidingevidenceat the impact level, as the lackofcomparabledata leads to problemsofaggregation thatcannotbeovercome,at leastnotuntil theportfolios havematured further andmeasurement norms and standards are agreed. The first important element of the micro-macro paradox is evident in the judgments on efficiency and effectiveness. Where these were rated, efficiency was deemed to be lowor unsatisfactory.Where effectivenesswas rated, evidence pointed in thedirectionofmoderately satisfactory to fully satisfactoryoutputs.On the direct impact level, of amounts of GHG emission reductions in the new situation, only theGEFprovided evidence at the portfolio level, but other evalua- tions certainly provided evidence at the intervention level, such as the IDB,ADB, and Swiss Cooperation. The only discrepancy in findings emerged between the NICFI and UN-REDDþ evaluations, where the Norwegian evaluation found a 2 ActiononClimateChange:WhatDoes ItMean andWhereDoes ItLeadTo? 21