ABSTRACT
The idea that poverty and environmental degradation are linked has been discussed, debated, rediscovered and reinvented numerous times. This chapter describes the challenge of evaluating such a broad and complex concept as the poverty–environment nexus. It reports on the ‘Evaluation of UNDP Contribution to Environmental Management for Poverty Reduction: The Poverty-Environment Nexus’, an evaluation commissioned by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to examine how the organization handles on the one side its core mandate (addressing poverty in the developing world) and environmental sustainability on the other side (an issue that is more often seen as the concern of other agencies and, by many developing countries, not a high priority). The evaluation had to accommodate a number of theoretical and practical questions, the first of which was why should poverty and the environment be linked; is it just received – and assumed – wisdom that UNDP should be addressing environmental issues as a way of achieving poverty reduction targets? Or would the ready availability of finance for the environment through the Global Environment Facility (GEF) dictate a focus on poverty–environment linkages without embedding the intellectual underpinnings of the nexus in the organization? These and other issues are addressed in the chapter that describes the methods and principal findings of the evaluation, with a special focus on Africa drawing on case studies from Mali, Morocco, Rwanda and Tanzania.
