Page - (000233) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

focusonreducingindustrialgasormanufacturingemissions.Whileinconclusiveon bestpractices, theacademic literatureprovides thecontoursofhowprogramdesign features may engage with intended outcomes (Bailis et al. 2009;Mobarak et al. 2012). This body of research has informed the policy-making community, most notably with the development of the Gold Standard certification scheme for best practices in carbonoffset project design (TheGoldStandard2010) and theGlobal AllianceforCleanCookstoves’ (GACC)recentpresentationofaconceptual frame- work on how to measure and monitor sustainable development against project indicators (GACC2014). 12.2.2 MeasuringSustainableDevelopment inCarbon Interventions Most practical attempts to measure sustainable development impacts across the market landscapemirror ormodify theGold Standard’s sustainable development matrix,whichidentifiesenvironmental,economicandsocial indicatorsandasks the project developer to rank theproject’s impact usinga scaled score chart from-2 to 2.Numerous academic and gray assessments of carbon projects utilize a portfolio analysisapproach inwhich theyconducta textual analysisof theproject’sbenefits, extracting information from the sustainable development matrix (Olsen and Fenhann 2006; Sutter andParre~no 2007).A limitation across these assessments is anabsenceof informationon thecausal pathways that link the indicator of interest to a development outcome. TheGACC is currentlyworkingwith the International Center forResearch on Women to create conceptual frameworks that link project indicators with three development outcomes of interest: women’s empowerment; the pathway between technology adoption and social/economic wellbeing and finally, the pathway between project implementation and livelihood enhancement (Fig. 12.1). These conceptual frameworks are based upon the GEF’s Theory of Change, a policy design paradigm thatmakes transparent the assumed relationships between policy actions (indicators), policy impacts (components) andoutcomes (goals). An earlier GACC publication by Troncoso presents an adoption index and project impact index for comparing project effectiveness within a portfolio (Troncoso 2014). Troncoso’s approach simply identifies key variables for the outcomeof interest andweights themaccording to relevance.AdaptingTroncoso’s generalmethod for creatingan impact indexderived from theGACC’s conceptual framework results in the creation of a new tool – a Livelihood Index (LI) – for valuing livelihood impacts fromcarbon-financed interventions. Beforedelvingfurther intotheassumptionsunderlyingandtheapplicationof the livelihood index, it is worth addressingwhy local economic impacts matter. The vastmajority of studies on carbonmarkets andenvironment-development projects more generally focus on the user experience: how and why users adopt a new 12 Unpacking theBlackBoxofTechnologyDistribution,Development Potential. . . 217