ABSTRACT
Evaluation is finally starting to recognise that humans, and our goals for human development, rights and security rest on our extraction from the natural system. Evaluators have until recently ignored the natural system, which has created a systematic positive and silo reinforcing bias in evaluation and risks rendering evaluation irrelevant for the major issues of the day – extinction and the climate crisis. As evaluation recognises and addresses its responsibilities to contribute to forestalling extinction it will need to mainstream sustainability, meaning that all evaluation will need to start from the nexus with connected human and natural systems. This requires an evaluation capacity and functions that are ready for sustainability. The pathway to evaluation that is sustainability-ready requires that all evaluation undertakings value the natural system and immediately recognise and address important differences between human and natural systems, scale, units of account and connectivity. The knowledge and methods exist in evaluation, social and biophysical sciences. The challenge is therefore not technical but political. It is political because the origins of evaluation and the social sciences on which evaluation rests are in the values and structures that are strongly founded on a claim that humans have dominion over all other things and that all value rests upon human effort. This claim of dominion extends to other, that is, non-European, humans and underpins colonialism and racism. Mainstreaming sustainability will prove challenging and for evaluation to progress it will have to elevate the importance of pursuit of use. The premise of this chapter is that evaluation has an important role in assisting sustainable development efforts get closer to a sustainable and productive nexus where we can make gains in poverty reduction and improve the environment in the present, thereby contributing to a sustainable and better future.
Much has changed in the six years since the first edition of this volume was published. The inextricable connection between human and natural systems has been demonstrated with increasing intensity and frequency; wildfires, drought, flooding, cyclones and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic are translating the repeated forecasts and warnings of impending climate and sustainability crises into indisputable realities. What was termed climate change five years ago is now framed as climate crisis or extinction. We are clearly reaching the limits to extraction from the natural system, limits beyond which there does not appear to be a return. We also appear to be reaching new limits to the ability of capital to increase exploitation through increasing technology, destruction of labour and social protections, globalisation and state capture.
Addressing extinction (as in extinction crisis) clearly requires a more urgent, systematic and comprehensive agenda than does addressing change (as in climate change). 1 There is a clear awakening to this that was not present five years ago. Writing then I used examples of how major multilaterals addressing development and biodiversity focused on one system or the other; it appeared then that having organisations consider two system approaches was the priority (Rowe, 2014, pp. 45–46); writing today it is clear that the unfolding extinction crisis is mobilising interest and responses that recognise the dependence of the human on the natural system, the fragility and limits of natural systems, and the complicated and dynamic coupling of the systems. Some multilateral and bilateral development agencies (such as IFAD, FAO, UNDP and UNIDO) are mainstreaming climate and sustainability or at least systematically addressing sustainability and environmental and climate funds such as the Green Climate Fund, The Global Environment Facility the Climate Investment Fund and the Adaptation Fund consider climate grounded in the context of sustainable development, and regard sustainability as a multigenerational concept addressing both human and natural systems and recognise that they are tightly bound and inseparable (Uitto, 2016; Reid, et al., 2017; Geoghegan, et al., 2019).
Up to only a few years ago evaluation showed little if any interest in the natural system. Evaluation is awakening to the need to address the natural system and important initiatives have been launched and more are emerging. However evaluation is starting from a very weak position where the natural system is still missing from most evaluation thought and practice; and evaluation is far from a unified endeavour that can be mobilised to quickly shift to systematically mainstream sustainability. Contributing to efforts to address the extinction crisis requires everything that evaluation can muster. Mindful of the many priorities that could detract from this I launched a call: All Hands on Deck – Everyone to the Nexus! (Rowe, 2019), meaning we need to quickly mainstream sustainability and climate into all evaluation undertakings and that these must necessarily address nexus (United Nations Development Programme – Evaluation, 2010) positions where both human and natural systems are considered as potentially central. I term this sustainability-ready evaluation. We need all our capacities and resources for this, that is all methods, all evaluation and, as well, evaluation-like efforts from the biophysical side.
This chapter represents a substantial update on the original, largely because of the rapidly changing awareness of the extinction challenge and in recognising that evaluating sustainability is increasingly being recognised as necessary, and because important new developments in evaluation and programming have and are occurring. In updating this chapter, I focus on what is needed now in 2020, evaluation that is ready to evaluate at the nexus where both human and natural systems are present. The outline Theory of Change for sustainability-ready evaluation is presented underlining why sustainability must be mainstreamed throughout evaluation and an assessment of the readiness of evaluation to address sustainability is provided. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the key elements for an evaluation able to address sustainability.
