Jul 20, 2022
By Rasmus Heltberg
Evaluating the transformative impacts of climate finance is challenging because it can be applied across various issues such as mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and many more areas. Evaluators require a wide lens into systems, markets, sectors, and a wide variety of other contexts much beyond the confines of individual projects.
In June, a team representing the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) headed to Copenhagen, Denmark for the European Evaluation Society’s (EES) bi-annual meeting, an international forum that brings together practitioners and researchers working in evaluation.
The CIF team led and contributed to various sessions covering topics such as evaluating partnerships, evaluation systems, and evaluating climate finance projects. An important pillar of CIF’s work is that of transformational change through the Transformational Change Learning Partnership (TCLP). CIF-led sessions provided a platform for evaluators from various organizations to share their thinking, approaches, and practices around evaluating transformational change in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Discussions delved into various aspects of evaluating transformational change, including:
- Understanding how to ensure a line of sight from project-level outputs and outcomes to system-level outcomes and assess whether these are transformational.
- Conducting evaluations for projects in the present, against expected outcomes which will only materialize over the long term and at a future date.
- How evaluative criteria and thinking can be used to assess a proposed project’s likely transformational impacts and incentivize teams to include transformational change principles into project designs.
The CIF has a strong focus on evaluation. It conducts internal evaluations and commissions external assessments of its climate finance programs. Through its Evaluation and Learning (E&L) Initiative, evaluations identify strategic lessons from across the CIF portfolio to facilitate learning that is timely, relevant, and applicable to climate investments. This puts CIF in the unique position of being a “learning laboratory” for climate finance. The outcomes, challenges, and opportunities that emerge from strategic, demand-driven studies can lead to applied learning. These lessons also inform future CIF programs and have relevance to climate strategies outside of CIF more broadly.
Sharing conceptual and operational experiences benefits CIF because it brings fresh thinking and approaches from colleagues and organizations in global evaluation practice. These discussions held at EES will continue in future evaluation forums such as the American Evaluation Association (AEA) and the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA) when they hold their global meetings later this year.
