Sustainability-Ready Evaluation

A Call to Action

Authors

  • Debbie Delancey Aurora Research Institute, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
  • Andy Rowe Footprint Evaluation, Maple Bay, British Columbia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3138/cjpe.76349

Keywords:

sustainability, climate, equity, Canada, evaluation, capacity

Abstract

The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of climate change and loss of biodiversity, but the evaluation profession has failed to develop the approaches and tools needed to effectively evaluate programs that operate at the nexus of human and natural systems. The Canadian Evaluation Society (CES) undertook a stocktaking in 2019–2020 to assess the state of sustainability-ready evaluation in Canada. The results confirmed that sustainability is not being systematically addressed by evaluators in Canada and the United States and that considerable work is needed to equip the profession to respond to the need. The CES has taken steps toward promoting the importance of sustainability, but more work is needed to ensure the profession is equipped to effectively address all dimensions of sustainability.

References

Brousselle, A. M. (2022). A theory-based approach to designing interventions for Planetary Health. Evaluation, 28(3), 330–355.

Canadian Evaluation Society. (2018). Competencies for Canadian evaluators. https://evaluationcanada.ca/career/evaluator-competencies.html

Canadian Evaluation Society. (2019). 2019–2024 strategic plan. https://evaluationcanada.ca/client_assets/PDFs/CES%20Strategic%20Plan%20EN.pdf

Canadian Evaluation Society. (2020, December). Report on Stocktaking for Sustainability-Ready Evaluation. https://evaluationcanada.ca/client_assets/PDFs/StocktakingReport_2021.pdf

Canadian Evaluation Society. (2021, April 13). CES Sustainability Working Group: Report on stocktaking for sustainability-ready evaluation.https://evaluationcanada.ca/client_assets/PDFs/StocktakingReport_2021.pdf

Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, Republic of South Africa. (2022, July 19). DPME Evaluation Guideline 2.2.22: Guidelines for applying the climate and ecosystems health criterion in the commissioning, design and implementation of evaluations. https://www.samea.org.za/summernotefile/dump?summernotefile_id=238

Government of Canada. (2022, June 11). Guidance for drafters of Treasury board submissions. https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services/treasury-board-submissions/guidance-for-drafters-of-treasury-board-submissions.html

Government of Northwest Territories. (2022). Policy 53.05: Statement of environmental values. https://www.ntassembly.ca/sites/assembly/files/td_670-192.pdf

Mascia, M. B., Fox, H. E., Glew, L., Ahmadia, G. N., Agrawal, A., Barnes, M., Basurto, X., Craigie, I., Darling, E., Geldmann, J., Gill, D., Holst Rice, S., Jensen, O. P., Lester, S. E., McConney, P., Mumby, P. J., Nenadovic, M., Parks, J. E., Pomeroy, R. S., & White, A. T. (2017). A novel framework for analyzing conservation impacts: Evaluation, theory, and marine protected areas. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1399(1), 93–115.

Ofir, Z., & D. Rugg. (Eds.). (2021). International Developments in Evaluation: Transforming Evaluation for Times of Global Transformation [Special section]. American Journal of Evaluation, 42(1), 47–52.

Rowe, A. (2018). Ecological thinking as a route to sustainability in evaluation. In R. Hopson & F. Cram (Eds.), Tackling wicked problems in complex evaluation ecologies: The role of evaluation (pp. 25–44). Stanford University Press.

Rowe, A. (2019). Sustainability-ready evaluation: A call to action. New Directions in Evaluation, 2019(162), 29–48.

Rowe, A. (2022). Evaluation at the endgame: Evaluating sustainability and the SDGs by moving past dominion and institutional capture. In J. I. Uitto & G. Batra (Eds.), Transformational change for people and the planet(Sustainable Development Goals Series, pp. 207–221). Springer.

Rowe, A., & Uitto, J. (in press). Sustainability, evaluation and credentials. Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation.

Todd, D. (2022, March 8). Incorporating environmental considerations into UNEG member agency evaluation. Earth Eval. https://www.eartheval.org/blog/incorporating-environmental-considerations-uneg-member-agency-evaluations

Van den Berg, R., Bours, D., Brouselle, A., Cekan, J. Chaplowe, S., Chelimsky, E., Davies, I., & Uittto, J. (2022). What should evaluation learn from COP 26? Views of evaluation practitioners. Evaluation 28(1), 7–35.

Downloads

Published

2023-07-15

How to Cite

Delancey, D., & Rowe, A. (2023). Sustainability-Ready Evaluation: A Call to Action. Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 38(1), 128–138. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjpe.76349

Issue

Vol. 38 No. 1 (2023): June

Section

Research and Practice Notes

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Debbie Delancey, Andy Rowe

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors contributing to The Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 (CC-BY-NC) license. This licence allows this work to be copied, distributed, remixed, transformed, and built upon for any purpose provided that appropriate attribution is given, a link is provided to the license, and changes made were indicated.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.