Following the award of the Nobel prize in Economics to three professors who have innovated and advocated the use of randomized controlled trials in understanding effectiveness and efficacy, the World Development journal published by Elsevier invited experts from around the world to contribute short 2000 word articles on key learnings in this area. The special issue was published within three months and features an article by four IEU staff members. The article is titled Good will hunting: Challenges of theory-based impact evaluations for climate investments in a multilateral setting and is written by Dr. Jyotsna Puri (Jo), Dr. Archi Rastogi, Dr. Martin Prowse, and Dr. Solomon Asfaw. It analyses the challenges of theory-based impact evaluations and discusses how the IEU’s Learning-Oriented Real-Time Impact Assessment (LORTA) programme deals with the complexity of climate interventions and subsequent questions of measurement.

In 2018, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) initiated a multi-year Learning-Oriented Real-Time Impact Assessment (LORTA) programme to understand what works in climate interventions, for whom, how much, and why. LORTA supports quality data collection, learning, and causal impact measurement. LORTA requires leadership from project teams alongside an openness by management to build measurement structures and learning into their decision-making. The article highlights the dynamics and challenges encountered when institutionalizing LORTA within the GCF ecosystem of international and national actors. These challenges may also apply in other multilateral settings.

Read the IEU short paper here (available free).

The full journal is present here and includes papers by many other experts in the field (some papers are gated).

Photo: A working session on Theory of change under LORTA scoping mission of the 2019 projects for the FP087 - Building livelihood resilience to climate change in the upper basins of Guatemala’s highlands. ©Esther Heesemann