ABSTRACT
There is a need – a long-standing, unsatisfi ed and steadily growing global need – to reconcile local development efforts with efforts to sustainably manage the global environment. The great insight of the 1980s Brundtland Commission – that neither global environmental management goals nor long-term development goals can be achieved independently – remains as valid today as it was then (UN 1987). It is a sobering observation in light of the substantial challenges that need to be overcome before achieving either of these goals. Among other things, the observation implies the need for international cooperation programmes that consistently and creatively address both goals. We now know from long experience that when one goal’s needs are steamrolled in our haste to contribute to achieving the other, both are unacceptably compromised. Meeting this dual imperative remains a daunting challenge, in part because of a long, unfortunate tradition of the ‘dialogue of the deaf ’: a dialogue that arises when those addressing the international development agenda and those addressing the environmental agenda approach the issues largely independently of one another. 1
The requirements for achieving global environmental goals and local development goals (both broadly defi ned, particularly regarding the scale of intervention implied by ‘local’), need to be reconciled. Evaluators of a wide range of international cooperation programmes have a valuable role to play in promoting this reconciliation. This chapter considers why this reconciliation is needed and some of the most obvious ways that evaluation can promote it.
