Page - (000058) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

3.1 Re-instatinganOlder ImpactTradition? The debate onwhat constitutes impact in evaluation continues, withmany in the evidence based movement1 focusing on “rigorous” experiments to measure and identify what works and what doesn’t, versus participatory and democratic approaches enabling beneficiaries to state what would be relevant for them. It is important tonote that both approaches, andmanyothers, tend to focuson thehere andnow:what is relevantnow,whatworksnowandwhatdoesn’t.However, there is another tradition in impact evaluation which is often overlooked or ignored, which is the historical approach. Every once in awhile a historical evaluation is done (Jerveetal. 1999), andeveryonce inawhile somebodyasksattentionfor this approach(vandenBerg2005),but it cannotbesaid tohavebeenastrong tradition, nor a tradition that made a big impression. Complaints have been that historical evaluation studies are very expensive, are perhapsmore research than evaluation, take a lot of timeandarenot impressive as regards learning, because lessons from yearsagomaynotberelevant to thepresentcircumstances, letalone the future (see for example the controversies surrounding theDutchhistorical evaluationsof long term relationships with several countries in van Beurden and Gewald 2004, pp. 63–67).So it iswith someenthusiasm that thedevelopment community turned toexperimental impact evaluation,preferably integrated into thedesignofprojects and executed during their lifetime, and hoped that this would turn up relevant evidence of what works that would provide lessons for the immediate future. However,what if the evidence ofwhatworks andwhat doesn’t only reveals itself over time?What if the time horizon is in decades?What else are we to do but integrate historical approacheswith other tools andmethods? Many problems in development are longer term in nature: to reduce absolute poverty, to reduce child-birth related death rates, to improve nutritional status, to integrate countries into the global economy, and so on – these aremeasured over decades and changes tend to happen relatively slowly. TheMillenniumDevelop- mentGoals ingeneraladdressedglobal trendsandimpactsathigherscales.At these levels impactevidencecannolongerbegenerateddirectlythroughexperimentsand other analytical tools suchasmeta-analysis, statistical analysis andmodelling tend to take over. TheMillenniumDevelopmentGoalsweremonitored through statis- tical data. As 2014 report on the achievements of theMillenniumDevelopment Goals states: “reliable and robust data are critical for devising appropriate policies and interventions for the achievement of theMDGs and for holding governments and the international community accountable” (UN 2014, p. 6). However, espe- cially when complex programmes and policies need to be improved, evaluations andresearchhave toplay their role, as theycanprovideanswers toquestionswhya certain trend is occurring. For this reason the 2030 agenda for sustainable 1Amovement that has its roots in evidence based medicine (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Evidence-based_medicine) and has spread to education, international development and other areas,where its characteristicsmaydiffer in someaspects. 38 R.D. vandenBerg