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The integrated nature of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for greater synergy, harmonization, and complementarity in development work. This is to be reflected in evaluation. Despite a long and diversified history spanning over almost three decades, joint evaluations have fallen out of fashion. Evaluators tend to shy away from joint evaluations because of timeliness, institutional and organizational differences, and personal preferences. As the SDGs call for more joint evaluations, we need to get them right. This article supports the appeal for more joint evaluations in the SDGs era by learning from the existing long and diversified experience. This article shares lessons from a joint evaluation that is relevant in the context of the SDGs for the United Nations Evaluation Group, the Evaluation Cooperation Group, and the wider international evaluation community.

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This chapter introduces strategic country cluster evaluations (SCCEs), a concrete example of how the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has dealt with the increasing complexity of GEF programming. This complexity reflects the interconnectedness—in terms of both synergies and trade-offs—between socioeconomic development priorities and environment conservation imperatives that is typical of many country settings in which GEF projects and programs are implemented, such as least developed countries and small island developing states. SCCEs address this complexity by applying a purposive evaluative inquiry approach that starts from aggregate analyses designed to provide trends and identify cases of positive, neutral, or negative change, and proceeds to in-depth data gathering aimed at identifying the specific factors underlying the observed change in those specific cases. By establishing the interconnectedness and sequencing of the various evaluation components, rather than conducting these in parallel, SCCEs provide an opportunity to focus on a limited set of purposively selected issues that are common in clusters of countries and/or portfolios. This enables a comprehensive understanding of the factors at play in complex national and local settings.