Conference: Evaluating Sustainable Development

IDEAS GLOBAL ASSEMBLY 2015

Call for Abstracts

Extension of deadline

Conference: “Evaluating Sustainable Development”

Thailand,October 26 – 30, 2015

(Organized co-jointly with theFourth International Conference on

National Evaluation Capacities)

Background

The International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS), established in 2002, is the only global professional evaluation for individual members and the only association focused primarily on development evaluation. It has more than 750 members from more than 70 countries, with a majority of members living in the global South, possessing a great variety of backgrounds, from the private sector to philanthropy, from governments and international organizations to local communities, and from academia to action oriented grass-roots organizations. The mission of IDEAS is to “improve and extend the practice of development evaluation by refining knowledge, strengthening capacity, and expanding networks for development evaluation, particularly in developing and transition countries.”

The theme for the upcoming Global Assembly is “Evaluating Sustainable Development”. This theme recognizes the move towards integrating sustainability in development, as illustrated in the sustainable development goals which the UN will adopt as successors to the millennium development goals. The evaluation community as well as policy makers, politicians and stakeholders in the development world need to be ready for these goals and think through what changes they would bring to development policies and programs, to action for equity and gender, to public service and market based interventions, and to democratic governance and accountability. To make our societies and economies more sustainable means that we need to integrate environmental concerns and ecosystem services in our thinking, as we cannot survive in a world that has depleted resources and degraded ecosystems. A balance will need to be achieved between the social, economic and environmental domains. And this balance will need to be sustainable over time: the needs of current generations will need to be balanced with the needs of future generations. Evaluators will be asked to integrate these issues into evaluations of policies, programs and interventions.
Further information may be found on the IDEAS website:

Themes

The 2015 Global Assembly aims to gather evaluators from all over the world to discuss possible solutions to the emerging evaluation challenges. For this purpose IDEAS invites members and interested evaluation professionals to submit abstracts of evaluation presentations that fit into the overall theme of the conference. Furthermore, IDEAS envisages the following presentation streams that identify further which sustainable development issues we would like to see presented at the Global Assembly:

1. Education
2. Health
3. Equity and Gender
4. Climate Change
5. Impact
6. M&E Systems and capacity development

IDEAS has thematic interest groups in these areas and will mobilize these groups to help select the most promising presentations. A limited number of grants will be available to support presenters from developing countries to attend the Global Assembly 2015.

Selection Criteria

The selection committee will be looking at contributions that provide interesting and promising examples of how sustainable development issues can be evaluated, or that raise critical questions and issues that will define future practice. Abstracts may propose presentations, panel sessions, posters or special sessions.

Abstracts will be reviewed on the following broad criteria:

1. Relevance (abstracts must align in a concise and coherent way with the conference themes and objectives as well as the target audience).
2. Novelty and innovation (abstracts must present new or emerging issues).
3. Advancement of practice (abstract should present a significant contribution to the field).
4. Overall clarity and quality of abstract (abstracts should ensure easy understanding of issues and objectives of the paper).
5. Originality and unpublished work (presentation must be original and should not have been previously published).

Abstracts will be reviewed by a selection committee to select those that will be presented at the conference. Female and young practitioners from developing countries and countries with economies in transition are strongly encouraged to submit abstracts.

Submission Procedure

A 400 words maximum abstract in Microsoft Word format should be emailed to the IDEAS Board Secretary, Cristina Magro () not later than
June 15, 2015 and must include the following information:

1. Name and title of presenting author
2. Email and telephone contact details of presenting author
3. Title of the paper
4. Name/s, title/s and institutional affiliation/s of author(s)
5. Whether the presenting author would need to be sponsored financially to attend the conference

The language of presentation will be English.

Applicants will be notified if their abstract is accepted by July 15, 2015.