ABSTRACT
Interest in the evaluation of sustainable development has increased due to a growth in environmental policies and programmes. Another reason is that we live in a time when evaluation is common practice, something that rational actors and organisations should do. The EU undertakes evaluations of policies and programmes for sustainable development for the purpose of policy improvement and accountability, for example. Policy-makers at different levels of government also initiate evaluations in this field for different purposes, including learning and knowledge generation. At present there are many approaches to the evaluation of (local) sustainable development reported in the literature. There is a need to discuss the different approaches and highlight the advantages and disadvantages for local development practice. We know that many evaluations are not used and there is also a need to learn more about this. The concept sustainable development is ambiguous and when it comes
to evaluation there is a need to recognise and take into account different understandings and perspectives of sustainable development (Eckerberg, 2007; Baker and Eckerberg, 2008; Baker, 1997; Fischer and Hajer, 1999). A presumption in the discourse on sustainable development is that today’s society is unsustainable. Whether or not a current situation is unstable is also an empirical question. There is no consensus as to what can be interpreted as steps towards a sustainable future. Hence, we need to find ways to inter-subjectively describe the current situation and then examine how the situation has changed during the course of a policy or programme. How prevailing approaches to sustainable development evaluation capture the notion of sustainable development is not only an academic question. If the approaches are not considered relevant and useful by practitioners in the
first place, one should not expect that the evaluation will be used in practice. Because more and more evaluations are initiated there is a need to discuss the different approaches’ validity and usefulness together with the question of use in local practice. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of and discuss different
approaches to evaluate policy and programmes for (local) sustainable development and to look into their usefulness for practice. Special attention is paid to how socio-economic and environmental indicators can be used in evaluation and how to assess environmental and socio-economic conditions and change. Lately, a number of sustainable development indicator systems have been developed to assist planning and evaluation for sustainable development. But how useful are such indicator systems and what can we learn from using indicators to describe local conditions and evaluate the impact of programmes? An evaluation should be sensitive to local conditions and, as illustrated in
this chapter, official statistics can be used for describing local conditions and problems. There is also a need to discuss environmental and socio-economic indicators per se. Indicators can be used in many ways, e.g. to identify problems, set goals, monitor programme implementation and as one tool in evaluation. Whether a set of indicators is relevant and useful depends on “for whom” and “for what” they are developed and if they have face validity. This chapter pays special attention to indicators that are open, free and easy to access, and that make sense to different stakeholders, including decisionmakers, practitioners and engaged citizens, and to the question of local use of indicators. These issues will be discussed with examples borrowed from an evalu-
ation of a project for sustainable development in a small municipality in the North of Sweden. A lot is written about indicators and monitoring systems on a “design level”, but not much about the practical problems involved in using indicators and evaluation. This case is used to illustrate and discuss how to account for and interpret change over time, and to assess programme effects. Based on one external and one internal evaluation of the project, the problems of choosing and using evaluation are also discussed. Evaluations are sometimes initiated and used for strategic, symbolic or legitimisation purposes (Power, 1997; Chelimsky, 2006; Hanberger and Gisselberg, 2008; Vedung, 1997) and one must always be aware of the political nature of evaluation (Chelimsky, 2006; Weiss, 1998). I will discuss my own experience of how the evaluation tool was managed and used in this case. First, the chapter presents a brief overview of prevailing approaches to
the evaluation of sustainable development followed by a discussion about sustainable development indicators developed at the local level in Sweden. Then, challenges involved in evaluating sustainable evaluation in practice will be discussed in relation to the project Sustainable Robertsfors.
