A Joint Evaluation With Lessons for the Sustainable Development Goals Era: The Joint GEF-UNDP Evaluation of the Small Grants Programme

Abstract

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.

Evaluation at the Endgame: Evaluating Sustainability and the SDGs by Moving Past Dominion and Institutional Capture

“…The underlying premise of sustainability-ready evaluation is that evaluators will recognize the need to address effects in the natural as well as the human system and take evaluation to a place where existing capacities are insufficient. Evaluators will need to, for example: recognize, speak, and hear representatives of natural system knowledge; learn how to feasibly address dynamically coupled systems (Liu, 2007); incorporate effects that have widely differing temporal and spatial scales and very differently framed units of account; and be open to and advocate for shared evaluation functions (see Carugi & Bryant, 2019;Rowe, 2012;Uitto, 2019).…”

Catching the Wave: Harnessing Data Science to Support Evaluation’s Capacity for Making a Transformational Contribution to Sustainable Development

“…Some of this is compiled on platforms like the Open SDG Data Hub, but more has not been collated and compiled in comprehensive databases and repositories, as it comes through many diff erent channels and streams. Not only does this clearly argue for a revival of collaborative joint evaluations working across the SDGs ( Carugi & Bryant, 2020 ) to ensure key learnings are captured ( Patton, 2019a ), but it also makes a strong argument for the evaluation community to increasingly adopt the tools, instruments, and technologies of data science to manage complex data to address complex evaluation questions that sustainable development interventions generate (York & Bamberger, 2020).…”