New evaluation resource outlines an “environmental approach for generational impact”

At Integrity, we believe that evaluators have a clear role to play in mainstreaming climate and biodiversity considerations across the programme cycle. We are therefore excited to share details of a new publication by Integrity Senior Expert Lamia Renaud that aims to expand evaluators’ thinking around the growing challenges caused by climate change and environmental degradation.

The approach represents an important shift from understanding nature as a resource, to understanding natural systems as an influential actor in development programmes. It supports evaluators in recognising the footprint cost of economic and social results and the hidden downstream costs these results cause for generations. This encourages evaluators to think about alternatives in which nature does not pay the price for human system development.

The Environmental Approach for Generational Impact

In May 2021, Lamia was awarded the UK Evaluation Society’s Early Career Evaluator Prize at the Society’s Annual Conference. Since this award, the theoretical framework she presented at the conference has been published as a resource on the global collaborative evaluation platform Better Evaluation, following engagements with Better Evaluation’s founder and former CEO Patricia Rogers and Knowledge Manager Alice MacFarlan.

The Environmental Approach for Generational Impact draws on a wealth of experience designing, delivering and implementing international development programmes. It presents a new system-based approach to designing and evaluating programmes in a way that fully embeds environment and biodiversity issues.

The approach seeks to put nature back at the centre of development work to encourage more ambition when it comes to mitigating or avoiding environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. In the paper, Lamia argues that the practical application of this approach could better meet donor reporting and accountability commitments to citizens, investors and the communities programmes are intended to support.

With 40% of the world’s population now highly vulnerable to climate change (IPCC, 2022), this shift in mindset and approach is more important than ever. At Integrity, we will continue to play our part in embedding these crucial considerations across our work.

How to access and engage with the approach

The paper is openly available at Better Evaluation. A discussion forum for further conversation about applying the theoretical framework is also hosted on the Footprint Evaluation Forum, a co-creation and research project hosted by Better Evaluation and supported by the Global Evaluation Initiative.