Co-hosted by DFID and organized co-jointly with the Fourth International Conference on National Evaluation Capacities)
Conference website here
Background
The International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS), established in 2002, is the only global professional evaluation for individual members and the only association focused primarily on development evaluation. It has more than 750 members from more than 70 countries, with a majority of members living in the global South, possessing a great variety of backgrounds, from the private sector to philanthropy, from governments and international organizations to local communities, and from academia to action oriented grass-roots organizations. The mission of IDEAS is to “improve and extend the practice of development evaluation by refining knowledge, strengthening capacity, and expanding networks for development evaluation, particularly in developing and transition countries.”
The theme for the upcoming Global Assembly is “Evaluating Sustainable Development”. This theme recognizes the move towards integrating sustainability in development, as illustrated in the sustainable development goals which the UN will adopt as successors to the millennium development goals. The evaluation community as well as policy makers, politicians and stakeholders in the development world need to be ready for these goals and think through what changes they would bring to development policies and programs, to action for equity and gender, to public service and market based interventions, and to democratic governance and accountability. To make our societies and economies more sustainable means that we need to integrate environmental concerns and ecosystem services in our thinking, as we cannot survive in a world that has depleted resources and degraded ecosystems. A balance will need to be achieved between the social, economic and environmental domains. And this balance will need to be sustainable over time: the needs of current generations will need to be balanced with the needs of future generations. Evaluators will be asked to integrate these issues into evaluations of policies, programs and interventions.