Estratègies per al desenvolupament sostenible - Generalitat de ...

- the performance of individual strategy actors in implementing the strategy, interms of the effectiveness and efficiency of their service provision and management.Evaluating the results of the strategy is necessary to correlate actions with specificchanges in human and environmental conditions, test the strategic hypotheses(choice of priority issues, analysis of underlying factors, prescription of actions),assure accountability, capture lessons and develop capacity through learning.Reporting and dissemination of the above findings is necessary to feed back keymessages to key stakeholder groups, and thus enable them to continuously improvetheir behaviour, the strategy itself and its component activities. Some –or toofrequently all– of these elements have been missing from many strategies in thepast.From experience, effective monitoring and evaluation can be described as follows:Constructed and developed as a system that combines the functions describedin the previous section, and makes them a core part of the overall strategymanagement system.A mix of internal and external exercises. Internal approaches help with self-reflectionand adaptation. External exercises complement this by offering balanced judgement(by independent and/or multi-stakeholder groups).Driven by strategy objectives rather than (as so often at present) by the availabilityof data. This allows the generation of focused information rather than beingoverwhelmed by comprehensive (and not always useful) data. Monitoring everythingis impossible. It is impossible in theory because we do not know enough aboutnatural, social and economic systems to know all the aspects we could record –and new techniques and approaches are being developed all the time. It is impossiblein practice because there will never be enough resources – time, money, equipment,expertise – to record everything. Therefore, data selection is necessarily selective.Related to good baseline data to be able to compare “before and after” or “withor without action” situations. Many countries already undertake regular stocktakingsuch as state-of-the-environment reports, which could be built on to becomecomprehensive sustainability assessments.180