The Importance of Negative Evidence in Evaluation
by Rob D. van den Berg
Evaluation Connections, September 2013
The Theory of No Change
by Christine Woerlen
Evaluation Connections, September 2013
Rob D. van den Berg and Christine Woerlen presented the work of the GEF Evaluation Office and Climate-Eval on learning from the evaluation by paying attention to negative evidence and understanding why a specific intervention or policy does not work. Traditional evaluations often cannot clearly identify why something does not work. By gathering evidence on implementation failure, barriers to progress and unexpected developments, one may learn from failure as well as success. Meta-evaluation of climate-change mitigation evaluations identified a series of factors underlying failures which directed attention to policies that might have more impact on climate change trends. The framework of the "theory of no change" used by the meta-evaluation is now being developed into a tool for evaluations.
Click here to read both articles in the Evaluation Connections publication of the European Evaluation Society.