Environmental Program and Policy Evaluation: Addressing Methodological Challenges: New Directions for Evalution, Number 122

Although environmental policy and program evaluation emerged rather late compared to many other areas of public policy, an energetic evaluation community in the environmental field has emerged during the last decade. This is a community of evaluators with diverse backgrounds in environmental sciences, social sciences, and general evaluation. Evaluation in the environmental field is characterized by complex policies and programs around wicked problems. They exist within complex systems composed of interacting environmental and socioeconomic systems.

In furthering the state of evaluation in the environmental field, this issue of focuses on key methodological challenges:

1. time horizons
2. scaling
3. data credibility
4. research designs and counterfactuals

Contributors look at each challenge with two chapters, to enhance a pluralistic discourse for development of the theory and practice of environmental evaluation. The authors?from Australia, Europe, and North America?represent the diversity of the community with respect to their formal training, personal experiences, and institutional affiliations.

The issue concludes with two commentaries reflecting on the discussions in relation to that of contemporary evaluation in general and a summary of the insights for the future of environmental evaluation. These chapters cumulatively hold promise for furthering the quality of evaluations not only in the environmental field but in other fields as well.

This is the 122nd volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Evaluation, an official publication of the American Evaluation Association.

Matthew Birnbaum is an evaluation officer at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Affiliated also with American University, he has been associated with the evaluation field for close to two decades, dealing with a plethora of issues, among them conservation, poverty, alternative modes of transportation and rural economic development.

Per Mickwitz works as a senior researcher at the Research Programme for Environmental Policy at the Finnish Environmental Institute. He is also an adjunct professor of environmental policy at the University of Tampere.