This symposium explored how contested political contexts and environmental change collide. The Arab Spring has marked 2011 as a year of political transition. The events in the Middle East seem to reflect a new era of popular demand for democracy and rejection of entrenched authoritarian leaders. The sub-text to much of the political unrest, however, is the stark inequalities in income, access to opportunities, and the distribution of wealth from natural resources such as oil, gold, diamonds and other minerals, forests and agriculture. Such inequalities have significant implications not only for the ability of these societies to build lasting political stability, but also for creating positive responses to environmental and climatic change. From the torching of oil wells, to the shifts in access to common pool resources such as water and grazing land, violent political change has significant implications for ecosystems and the livelihoods of ordinary people. The inability to access resources and create resilient livelihoods, (along with a desire for less state repression), underpins many demands for greater political freedoms. Conversely, some insurgencies have unintentionally promoted the regeneration of forests, fisheries and other resources due to the threat of violence for people attempting to access such resources. 

Political change thus re-shapes the resources of states in profound, but often unpredictable ways, yet such changes remain on the periphery of analyses of contested politics. This symposium brought together scholars, development professionals and policy makers concerned about environment and development to debate the potential of contested political contexts to address and support efforts to mitigate and adapt to environmental changes, whether it be those caused by climate change, pollution from industrial extraction, or socio-ecological changes produced through agriculture, forestry and other livelihood strategies. The engagement of the international development community into ‘fragile’ states can be an important element in the shaping of post-conflict institutional and organisational development, but equally poses challenges for effective monitoring of the changes that the ‘aid’ community are promoting and the global politics associated with that. 

The questions addressed in this one-day intensive symposium included: 

Organisers: Dr. Andrea Nightingale, Professor Tim Hayward, Dr. Liz Grant, Mr. Jake Broadhurst, Dr. Sheelagh O’Reilly (IOD PARC)

• University of Edinburgh’s Global Academies 
• IOD PARC
• University of Zurich, Department of Geography 

This fund focuses on providing support to developing countries to defend their interests and advocate for change within the global trading system. TAF support will be available over the next four years to governments from the Least Developed Countries, Low Income Countries and the Regional Economic Communities and aims to develop their capacity to participate more effectively in trade negotiations and resolve trade disputes. 

TAF will support this outcome by providing access to high quality analysis and advice; training and development for negotiators; and resources to sustain their participation in trade negotiations. This will be achieved by contracting the services of third party service providers. Services will be of a specialised nature and high quality will be paramount. Service providers will be registered, according to their qualifications, on the TAF Service Provider Database. Only registered service providers (firms, organisations and individuals) will be eligible to participate under TAF's procurement opportunities. 

• Individual Consultants and Consultancy Firms interested in providing Trade Related Services under TAF. Consultancy Firms are expected to include law firms, training institutes, universities, think tanks, and other for-profit or not-for-profit organisations with relevant capability to undertake fee-for-service contracts on behalf of TAF. 

• Individual Consultants to provide Coaching Support to grant applicants. These types of interventions will focus on working with TAF applicants to review/develop trade negotiations management and capacity building strategies and, if appropriate, identifying and articulating short and longer-term needs for technical, legal and logistical support through TAF and other capacity building modalities. TAF Coaching Support will be of short term duration, typically a maximum duration of 3-6 weeks, including potential field work. 

More details of the Fund and how it can be accessed are provided on the DFID website.

We would like to offer you a short summary of what this programme will entail.

Support Government of Malawi energy strategy by accelerating the growth of community and renewable energy development in Malawi through multiple, targeted and coordinated activities with good potential to provide a platform for that growth. 

Please let us know what you think or if you’d like to know more…

But evaluators are, by nature, involved in a moral pursuit.  

Development ultimately derives it's legitimacy from action, not talk.  

So it stands to reason that bringing about more and better impact - the main occupation of evaluation - is ethical. Right?

This reasoning has seemed good enough for most evaluation up until now. After all, there seem to be limited opportunities for causing much ethical damage with key informant interviews and aggregating management numbers. In recent times, however, the quest for evidence has taken a different turn. Several significant actors in development evaluation are looking more and more at the type of evidence generated by clinical-style randomised evaluations.

Control trials change the ethical game. Suddenly there are claims of serious unethical consequences from the process of evaluation. Pitted against this is the claim that these randomised approaches will result in more money reaching more people in more beneficial ways. Few of us are well equipped to grapple with this conundrum.

We wanted to understand the issue of ethics in randomisation better, not so that we could decide which side of the debate is right, but to get a feeling for whether real life development organsiations have the capability to handle these new demands.

To achieve this we had to start by building an analytical framework that would let us to understand how ethics and evaluation interact in development organisations. This framework turned out to be a useful tool for demystifying different organisational cultures around ethics in evaluation.

We present this framework in our first learning product on the issue of ethics in evaluation. A forthcoming complementary piece will then look deeper at what we found when we used this framework to look at two major users of development evaluation.