Post date: Mar 17, 2016 2:00:08 AM
Myaguchi, Takaaki and Juha I. Uitto (2015). A Realist Review of Climate Change Adaptation Programme Evaluations: Its Methodological Implications and Programmatic Findings. Occasional Paper #3. New York: Independent Evaluation Office of UNDP.
(Available at http://web.undp.org/evaluation/documents/articles-papers/occasional_papers/Occasional_Paper_Climate_Change_Uitto_Miyaguchi.pdf)
Evaluating the effectiveness of climate change adaptation interventions has proven to be a difficult task. In an effort to shed light on the subject, this paper presents the methodology and results of a realist review of a set of climate change adaptation (CCA) programmes and their evaluations commissioned by the UNDP. This paper analyses CCA programmes in nine countries: Armenia, Egypt, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, the Philippines, Tanzania, Turkey and Zimbabwe. Together with their respective host governments, these programmes were implemented by either UNDP or various United Nations partner agencies and have already been evaluated. The authors have used a realist approach and conducted a meta-analysis of the programmes’ evaluation reports. Based on the analytical frameworks for evaluating CCA interventions, as well as the authors' own field experience, the paper hypothesizes a number of key context, mechanism, and outcome configurations, which are considered vital in a realist approach, but have not yet been widely tested in the field of CCA. Although they encountered limitations and methodological challenges, the authors posit that adopting a realist approach to complex development projects, such as these CCA programmes, is indeed a useful way of providing applicable explanations, rather than generalizations or judgments, of what types of projects/activities work for whom, in what circumstances, and how, for future CCA interventions in developing countries.