Page - (000060) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

aim to reduce the inflow of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If a sufficient number of these activities take place, it should be possible to stabilizeor even reduce the concentrationofgreenhousegasmolecules in the air, which is currently about 400 particles per million. While individual activitiesmaybequite successful in reducing emissions, the overall concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to increase. There are thus two kinds of impacts that the public is concerned about: do individual interventions work and lower the emissions, and is climate change stopped? The first question may be answered through counterfactual experimentation, modelling or through before/after measurements of greenhouse gas emissions. Nothing about this is as simpleas it sounds.Thecalculationandmeasurementofgreenhousegasemissions is not yet based on full understanding, agreement on principles and validation through international norms and standards. For an overview of the issues and what the current state of the art is, seeSTAP (2013). All thesuccessesofachievingimpactatproject levelhavesofarnotbeenable to change the overall trend in climate change,which is that the globalmean temper- ature continues to rise.Whenasking for evidenceof impact, donors and thepublic want toknowwhetherprojectshavean impact,whether theprojectdeliversand the causalmechanism that it embodiesworks. But donors and the public alsowant to knowwhether this leads to changes at higher levels, beyond thedirect influenceof the project, and ultimately theywould like to see climate change stopped or even reversed.Thedemand for impact evidence is legitimate at all levels andcannot be met by referring to impact evidence only at project level or in the context of one intervention or one causal mechanism. Understanding the range of questions on impactevidencewillenableevaluators tofocusonthekeyquestions thatneedtobe asked in evaluations andwill enable them to identify the tools andmethods that need to beused. 3.3 Theories ofChange forClimateChangeMitigation The standard approach to identify keyquestions in an evaluation is to look for the “theory of change” that identifies how the intervention is expected to achieve impact. In traditional impactevaluations this leads toan identificationof thecausal mechanism that is supposed to “work”. In climate change, this is usually a combi- nationofa technicalmechanismandabehaviourmechanism:“if thisnewtechnol- ogy is adopted by people/institutions/countries it will lead to reduced greenhouse gas emissions and thus to a lower rate of global warming”. Traditional impact evaluations tend to focus on what works to effectuate behaviour change. If the behaviour change occurs, the intervention “works” and should be promoted. If it does notwork, it shouldbe stopped. Organisations like3ie, devoted topromoting traditional impact evaluations, are verymuch aware that this simple versionmay lead to all kinds of perverse effects thatneedtobetakenintoaccountor lookedat,andfor thisreasontheyadvocatethat 40 R.D. vandenBerg