Page - (000068) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

mixedmethods evaluationsmay see it as awaste ofmoney to focus onone causal mechanismonly. Potentially meta-evaluations and meta-analysis could go a long way towards covering some of the gaps, as has been advocated by the evidence movement throughso-calledsystematicreviews.However, therearemethodologicalproblems with these reviews.They tend to focusonaspecificquestionandgothroughahuge number of studies and evaluations to see whether they provide evidence on that specificquestion.Many studies turnout not tohave evidence for that questionand thus are not used.Another issue is that these systematic reviews tend tonot accept evidence that is gathered outside the narrow range ofmethods that are considered by the evidence movement to be sufficiently rigorous.4 More recently realist perspectives have started to becomemore fashionable inmeta-evaluations,which broadens the range of evidence that is accepted. An example can be found in Chap. 13, ‘What do evaluations tell us about climate change adaptation’ of this book. 3.8 Conclusions There is a famous scene in the British comedy Fawlty Towers which provides a goodmetaphorofhowimpactevidencemaybetreatedbyanarrowinterpretationof evidence based politics. In this particular episode of Fawlty Towers the hotel manager Basil Fawlty puts some money on a horse in the hope of substantial Fig. 3.3 The space and scale dimensions of demand for impact evidence (Source:Author) 4See for example http://www.whatworksgrowth.org/resources/the-scientific-maryland-scale/. See also thediscussion inhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence. 48 R.D. vandenBerg