Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello, AEA365 community. My name is Dorothy Lucks, an inaugural member of EVALSDGs, a credentialed evaluator, a Fellow of the Australian Evaluation Society, and Executive Director of Sustainable Development Facilitation (SDF) Global, a social enterprise that works to facilitate change through evaluations. At SDF Global, we have a strong focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For those of you who are already committed to sustainable development in your own evaluation practice, you may be considering ways to engage the evaluation participants to consider their contribution to the SDGs and sustainable development. It is important for us to make an effort to link evaluations to the SDGs. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prominent in the evaluation sector, explicitly linking evaluations to the SDGs has the power to pick up the pace of SDG-related action and learning. We have put together a few tools that we have used over the years that you may find useful.
Hot Tips
- Use SDG language and communication tools. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was crafted by representatives across 193 countries. Having been part of some of the discussions, we know how much effort was made to keep the language and terms simple and accessible to most audiences. Using the same wording relevant to the evaluation work that you are doing provides a good link to the SDGs and the concepts that underly the intent of the goals. The SDGs communication materials are free to use, are attractive and are available in 6 languages.
- Use relevant SDG indicators and analytics. There is an SDG database that is a portal for each indicator and that provides data worldwide. Using the most recent data can help to get evaluation participants thinking about how what they are dealing with is both a local and a global issue. You can compare the context that you are working in with other similar contexts to help with assessing progress or seeking innovative recommendations that could be adapted to the needs of the people that you are working with. There are links to useful resources on many topics that can give ideas on how analysis is being done, case studies and other useful resources.
- Use the 5 Ps and SDG dollars to demonstrate trade-offs and priorities. This was an innovation that we used with a group of decision-makers in a city where there were competing priorities for resources between social, economic and environmental concerns. Using the 5 P’s of the 2030 Agenda: people, prosperity, planet, partnership and peace, it was easy to ask participants to speak up about their priorities. Then each person was allocated the same amount of SDG “money”. Each participant could “spend” the money in line with their priorities. But then it was clear what could not be funded if their priority received what it needed. It also raised the question of power balance when there were more people with the same priority that could advocate using their resources – leading to lower resources for the environment or vulnerable people. This was a powerful way to bring home the realities of the city budgeting process and the risks and trade-offs implicit in decision-making for sustainable development.
I hope these top three tips will help you think about how you actively bring the SDGs into your evaluation practice. Using tools like these can bring sensitive issues for sustainable development to the forefront of evaluation work in a participatory and strategic way, that engages decision makers in a practical way and leads to better decisions and ultimately more sustainable outcomes.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Hi Dorothy! I have worked over the past 30 years for NGOs and UN agencies (UNDP, FAO) both as programme manager and evaluator. I recently completed two evaluations for FAO focused on SDG 2 and SDG 6. Based on this experience, I am spurred by your excellent blog to add a few “tricks” to yours. Here you go:
Trick 1: Scope pragmatically, but not too narrowly
The inter-relatedness of the SDGs implies that there is no such thing as a well-defined, self-contained scope for an SDG evaluation. So scope pragmatically, starting with a reasonably well-defined initial scope (e.g. a target or an SDG), and discuss it with your audience. The scope must make sense to them, primarily.
Under any goal, there will be what I call “orphan targets”, i.e. issues flagged in the agenda that we are just now starting to work on. These are often the most innovative, where progress is needed the most. So avoid too narrow scope, expand horizons a bit, explore the connections and trade-offs with other goals, and pay attention the interplay between different targets within a goal.
Include knowledge and thought leadership in your scope, since this is an important function to support the SDGs. The 2030 agenda is a knowledge-intensive agenda. Exclude impact – this is more for national evaluation systems to look into. The SDGs are the goals of nations, to be achieved by nations with the help of all willing actors. Within an SDG paradigm, it makes no sense to speak of “our impact”.
Trick 2: Make use of the SDG principles
Beyond goals, targets and indicators, the 2030 agenda also includes a set of principles not really codified officially anywhere but with significant repercussion on the way of doing business. The best know is “Leave No One Behind”, a commitment to end discrimination and exclusion and strongly reduce inequalities within and amongst countries. Other “SDG principles” are: the three dimensions of sustainability (social, environmental and economic); national leadership in priority setting, implementation and reporting; acting at scale to transform systems radically rather than reform at the margin; and innovation seen as key to reduce our ecological footprint.
In our experience, these principles can be of great use to spur change in an organization, especially, dare I say, in such a bureaucratic organization as FAO where “business as usual” is almost a way of life. If you focus your evaluation only on the goals and targets of the 2030 agenda, you will miss out on all this reformist energy in the principles
Trick 3: Manage expectations, including your own
The SDGs form a very visible agenda. Any evaluation related to them will attract attention. Everybody wants to be seen as not just supporting the SDGs but doing so better and more than anybody else… Consequently, SDG evaluations are high-pressure evaluations, where expectations from the evaluand’s management are very high. Evaluators need to manage the evaluand’s expectations constantly, resist pressure for “looking good”, and channel this high level of management attention towards effecting systemic change.
You might have to manage your own expectations as well. The SDG are a complex agenda, hard to understand and communicate. This complexity takes time to absorb and needs to be managed, or you will lose yourself and your audience in it. Don’t be afraid to simplify. Behind their apparent complexity, the SDGs are essentially about striking the right balance between contradictory objectives – there are a “balancing act”.
Likewise, there is no such thing as an exhaustive, accountability-oriented SDG evaluation. Don’t try and cover everything that happened and all the work done, good or bad. Sample instead, and do so purposefully with an explicit bias towards good practices and innovations, for learning purposes.
Dear Dorothy, I applaud you for an insightful blog.
The third point is particularly interesting because it explains in simple words how an evaluative mindset can help prioritize programmes and projects, and it teaches about power balance. It also poses an implicit question: what can we do when we do not have the resources? In New York City, to address this issue, there are several community-related volunteering opportunities that allow responsible citizens to contribute their time and skills in support of the most vulnerable groups or entities which are understaffed.
Thank you very much for sharing. It is a fantastic piece! Laura
Excellent blog by Dorothy Lucks.
I would like to note that Energy Evaluation Asia Pacific (EEAP) has been holding a series of webinars on the evaluation of SDG7 (Energy) since the beginning of the year. Our third one is scheduled for this Wednesday at 10 AM IST (Indian Standard Time). You can learn more about EEAP and the webinars at this site:
https://energy-evaluation.org/presentation-asia/
Look under Webinars for the webinar info for registering. And you can also look at our latest newsletter to learn about the past webinars.