Effects on sustainable development from large environmental programmes : a review of 16 evaluations

The purpose of this article is to develop criteria for meta-evaluation and narrative synthesis of sustainable development (SD) effects from large environmental programmes. First, the article develops the criteria and then demonstrates how these can be applied in the case of the Swedish Local Investment Programme targeting SD, through a review of 16 national evaluations. The review shows that the programme's effects on SD are mixed: it contributed to halting degradation of ecological capital, somewhat to restoring ecological capital, and to increasing human, social and manufactured capital. However, the programme also had some unintended negative and crowding-out effects on ecological and social capital, and on innovation. A methodological conclusion is that the evaluations lacked some essential information for assessing SD effects. For example, more than half of the evaluations scored low on intervention effects, a key criterion in the review. Reviews of SD effects need to compile knowledge from evaluations that use different approaches with varying quality. What is defined as acceptable quality determines if comprehensive conclusions of SD effects can be drawn.