Using Theories-of-Change for Assessing Effectiveness of Cooperative Initiatives for Global Environmental Governance

Abstract

Measuring effectiveness of cooperative initiatives (CIs), involving subnational and non-state actors, including cities, regions, companies, indigenous peoples, civil society organisations, active in multiple issue areas of environmental governance poses a considerable challenge for both researchers and practitioners. Little is known about the impact of these initiatives on outcomes of global environmental governance. This paper presents a novel framework for analysing the process of an envisaged change, matching activities of CIs with desired outcomes, and facilitating evaluation of a diverse set of CIs active in global environmental governance. We propose a framework of four ideal types of “theories-of-change” (ToC) categorising initiatives based on the governance function they perform, considering four main functions: (1) information sharing and networking, (2) operations on the ground, (3) standards and commitments, and (4) providing financing. The paper demonstrates the usefulness of this framework by applying it to an empirical case, namely, to a large-n database of 271 CIs active in biodiversity governance and four illustrative examples of CIs within each ideal type. We find that the four ideal types are useful for describing a diverse set of CIs active in biodiversity governance. We propose that this framework provides a flexible approach to structure and evaluate the expected effectiveness of initiatives using a set of tailor-made indicators. In addition, we suggest that this framework provides useful policy relevant insights, by enabling comparison and evaluation of the expected effectiveness of CIs across scales.

Keywords: effectiveness, global environmental governance, cooperative initiatives, Biodiversity