Sustainability: Does Evaluation Have a Role?

Excerpts from the article follow:

"Evaluation can support initiative sustainability by:

• Facilitating a focus on sustainability during strategy development
• Tracking progress and regularly feeding back information that can be used to ensure that sustainability is on course

Supporting Sustainability During Strategy Development

Sustainability should be integrated into an initiative's strategy from the very beginning so that plans for what will happen when the funding ends are incorporated at the outset.

...Evaluators...can offer information in the form of a needs assessment or analysis of funding trends to support strategic analysis. They can also facilitate aspects of strategic planning, such as the development of the initiative's theory of change or its goals and objectives. Finally, evaluators can inform strategic management by reporting back information from the evaluation itself.

This model requires evaluator involvement in the initiative from its beginning as part of the core strategy development team. It also requires that evaluators and the evaluation be flexible and be predictive of, and responsive to, the initiative and community's needs. This approach fits well with the complex nature of most community-based initiatives, which typically evolve over time with no set script.

The model does not propose that evaluators actually make decisions about what the initiative's strategy should be. Rather, it proposes that evaluators, who are uniquely skilled in the language and process of strategy development and often have the most comprehensive perspective on an initiative, play a supportive and advisory role in its development....

Supporting Sustainability During Evaluation

Evaluation can also support sustainability by treating it as a variable to be operationalized and tracked over time, encouraging learning from an initiative's early stages. Few evaluators take this more purposeful approach either in their evaluation design or in their reporting.

Sustainability can be thought of as a way to ensure continuation of at least four initiative aspects: (1) funding for the initiative's organizations or projects, (2) the ideas, principles, beliefs, and values that underlie the initiative, (3) relationships that the initiative supports or encourages, and (4) the initiative's outcomes."

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Source

Excerpted from The Evaluation Exchange, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003. Published by Harvard Family Research Project.