Page - (000057) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

Chapter3 Mainstreaming ImpactEvidence inClimate ChangeandSustainableDevelopment RobD.vandenBerg Abstract This chapter examines the demand for impact evidence and concludes that thisdemandgoesbeyondtheexperimentalevidencethat isproducedduringthe lifetime of an intervention through “impact evaluations” as currently the term is usedbymany in theevidencemovement.Thedemand for evidenceof longer term impact at higher levels requires inspiration from an older tradition of impact evaluation and rethinkinghow the full rangeof impact evidence canbeuncovered in evaluations. This is especially relevant for sustainable developmentwhich calls for a balanced approach on societal, economic and environmental issues. Climate change isagoodexampleof thisanda theoryofchangeapproachserves to identify key questions over time, space and scale to ensure that impact evidence can be found and reported throughout the lifetime of projects, programmes and policies and beyond in ex post impact assessments. Such an approach leads to mainstreaming of impact questions and related evaluation approaches throughout project and policy cycles. This chapter will demonstrate that evidence can be gathered throughout the lifetime of a project and beyond, in different geographic locations from very local to global, at different levels from relatively simple one dimensional interventions tomulti-actor complex systems, up to global scales. It will thus argue formainstreaming impact considerations throughout interventions, programmes and policies and for evaluations to gather evidencewhere it is avail- able, rather than to focus the search for impact and itsmeasurement ononeor two causalmechanisms that are chosen for verification through experimentation. Keywords Impact • Evaluation • Sustainable development • Climate change • Evidence R.D. vandenBerg (*) King’sCollegeLondonand InternationalDevelopmentEvaluationAssociation (IDEAS), Leidschendam,TheNetherlands e-mail: rdwinterberg@gmail.com ©TheAuthor(s) 2017 J.I.Uitto et al. (eds.),EvaluatingClimateChangeAction for Sustainable Development,DOI10.1007/978-3-319-43702-6_3 37