When evaluation makes a difference

GOVERNMENTS routinely rely on evaluation to decide on investment projects in areas ranging from transport and energy to education and social protection. But are the evaluation techniques used adequate for judging the sustainability of the investments and policies in question? For the most part, since evaluations are typically partial and narrow in their focus, for example, on short-term economic growth, they are likely to give inadequate if not misleading signals for the needed directions in the highly inter-connected world that we live in.

A case in point is when a partial evaluation of deregulation, currently in vogue all across the world, might end up giving the policy direction high marks because it improves the ease of doing business, even though it dilutes environmental protection. A fuller evaluation, on the other hand, might show that the damages from environmental destruction and aggravation of climate change in an increasingly fragile ecology eventually hurts long-term growth and the well-being of people and the planet.

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a starting point to expand the evaluative focus from short-term growth to long-term welfare. SDGs are 17 goals pertaining to poverty, the environment and climate, human and social development. More significant than each of these goals in isolation is the interlinkages among them. For example, studies document the impact of corruption and weak governance in aggravating illegal logging and deforestation. The resulting environmental destruction and climate change, in turn, hurt the poor the most, and hence weaken the goal of greater social inclusion.