Global environmental changes are occurring at a faster pace than previously thought. In several areas, damage to the global environment has exceeded critical levels and threatens to lead to irreversible changes in global ecosystems. While the international community has invested sizeable resources to address the growing environmental issues, environmental financing needs are huge relative to demand, and remain largely unmet. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) take an integrated approach linking the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental.
2019 Conference Events
Earth-Eval workshop and sessions during the 3rd international conference
Prague, Czech Republic
Workshop 8: Evaluating at the Nexus of Development and Environment: Challenges and Opportunities (3rd Conf.)
Location: Hotel Duo, Prague, Czech Republic
Environment 1: Transformational change: Processes and Impact
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
This session focused on transformational change in the environment. The discussion focused on issues, processes, and impacts of transformational change. In particular in two main areas:
- deep dive into results, processes, and impacts of specific projects
- how research and evaluation can help with achieving transformational change
Chair: Geeta Batra
Environment 2: Drivers of Sustainability
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
The session on Drivers of Sustainability includes four presentations that bring varied perspectives to the topic. The presentation on "Assessing Sustainable Development" discusses how community focused development interventions may address sustainability. It brings experiences from development interventions in Malawi, Bolivia and India. The presentation on "Incentive Design for Results Based Financing – rather art than science?" assesses the extent to which design features aimed at addressing short term barriers may enhance sustainability of climate change mitigation interventions.
Environment 3: Adaptation: Lessons from recent experience
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
The third environment session on adaptation to climate change—lessons from recent experience—explores trends in evaluations by the OECD/DAC Network on Development Evaluation, ongoing evaluations on climate change adaptation by the German Institute for Development Evaluation, a systematic review of climate change adaptation evaluations, and a case study of leveraging gender equality and women’s empowerment for evaluating climate change adaptation.
Opening Session: Official opening of both conferences
Location: Prague Hall at the Duo Hotel
Welcome words of Rob D. van den Berg, IDEAS President, Juha I. Uitto, Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the Global Environment Facility (GEF-IEO) and Martin Pĕlucha, President of CES
Session 4 - Conference on Evaluating Environment and Development
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
Session with Anu Saxén, Karen Odhiambo, Mike Spilsbury and Michael Wells
Chair: Juha Uitto
Sponsors: GEF and Finland
Communities of Practice & Poster Session
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
A cocktail reception hosted by the GEF Independent Evaluation and FAO Office of Evaluation discussed the roles of Earth-Eval and Eval Forward communities of practice. The event focused on what the two communities of practices offer. Both platforms are ways evaluators could promote their work, opportunities to network, share knowledge and learn from others in the environmental evaluation field.
Introductions:
Environment 4: Evaluation Approaches for Assessing Cobenefits
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
This session focus was on how best to approach the socio-economic and environment nexus from an evaluation point of view in today’s SDGs’ context. Dr. Rowe made a provocative call for attention to the fact that while the SDGs have brought the social, the economic and the environmental closer to each other, they still threat them as separable. Prof. Miyaguchi suggested two theoretical frameworks to be used in evaluating at the nexus between the human and natural systems. Dr.
Environment 5: Blending Quantitative with Qualitative Analysis in Understanding Change
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
The session on Blending Quantitative with Qualitative Analysis in Understanding Change includes four talks on the experiences of various organizations in conducting mixed-method evaluations. The presentation on "Evaluating Natural Resource Management in the context of smallholder agricultural development: IFAD's experience" summarizes the multi-year institutional experience at IFAD in systematizing the evaluation of performance in natural resource management and climate change adaptation.
Environment 6: Formative and Real-time Evaluation
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
The session aimed to explore three questions about real time and formative evaluations:
Joint Session on the Prague Declaration and Closing Ceremony
Location: Amsterdam room at the Duo Hotel
Rob van den Berg, Daniel Svoboda and Juha Uitto chaired the session on editing the joint Prague Declaration on Evaluation for Transformational Change. The Declaration was presented to conference participants during the closing ceremony of the two conferences. It was officially adopted on Friday 4 October 2019.
click here to download the full document