- Evaluation Plan:
- 2017-2021, Suriname
- Evaluation Type:
- Final Project
- Planned End Date:
- 10/2018
- Completion Date:
- 04/2019
- Status:
- Completed
- Management Response:
- Yes
- Evaluation Budget(US $):
- 15,000
Mainstreaming global environment commitments for effective national environmental management
| Document | Type | Language | Size | Status | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 ii Executive Summary.pdf |
summary | English | 651.69 KB | Posted | 113 |
| 4937_CCCD_Suriname_TE draft 13 Jan 2019 clean (1).pdf |
related-document | English | 3103.76 KB | Posted | 162 |
| Final Procurement notice TE Mainstreaming Environment Conventions_.pdf |
tor | English | 961.58 KB | Posted | 88 |
| 4937_CCCD_Suriname_TE Jan 2019.pdf |
report | English | 2637.71 KB | Posted | 163 |
| Annex K Signed evaluation report clearance form.pdf |
related-document | English | 171.83 KB | Posted | 87 |
| Title | Mainstreaming global environment commitments for effective national environmental management | ||||||||||||||
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| Atlas Project Number: | 00083414 | ||||||||||||||
| Evaluation Plan: | 2017-2021, Suriname | ||||||||||||||
| Evaluation Type: | Final Project | ||||||||||||||
| Status: | Completed | ||||||||||||||
| Completion Date: | 04/2019 | ||||||||||||||
| Planned End Date: | 10/2018 | ||||||||||||||
| Management Response: | Yes | ||||||||||||||
| UNDP Signature Solution: |
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| Corporate Outcome and Output (UNDP Strategic Plan 2018-2021) |
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| SDG Goal |
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| SDG Target |
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| Evaluation Budget(US $): | 15,000 | ||||||||||||||
| Source of Funding: | Project Budget | ||||||||||||||
| Evaluation Expenditure(US $): | 15,000 | ||||||||||||||
| Joint Programme: | No | ||||||||||||||
| Joint Evaluation: | No | ||||||||||||||
| Evaluation Team members: |
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| GEF Evaluation: | Yes
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| Key Stakeholders: | NIMOS; Government of Suriname | ||||||||||||||
| Countries: | SURINAME |
| Lessons | |
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| 1. | The project demonstrated several good practices which resulted in the successful implementation of the project that may be adopted for the formulation of other projects. It also provided some points that future projects and projects elsewhere should try to avoid. Some of the best practices are: i. Training of local stakeholders on the use of the Land Use/Land Cover map for local development planning. This has been indicated by several respondents as being very useful as an anchor for overall capacity building. The national and district maps are now already being used for planning purposes. ii. Digitalization efforts for data and information that is available in written or printed format. In this, SuriCorp has been important, providing young volunteers to do the actual digitization (and herewith making these volunteers more employable), but the CCCD project has provided several organizations with the necessary hardware to make the transfer. This will help in gaining more insight in time lapses of environmental phenomena. iii. Clearly linking the project to an institution with a mandate to continue the path set out by the project. NIMOS’ Environmental Planning and Information Management bureau (EPI) was at the heart of the project, offering opportunity to explore its mandate in the matter. This ensures sustainability of the project results. iv. Tendering packages of project implementation to a consortium of national and international consultants. To create more efficiency of use of funding and time, project outcomes and outputs were combined into packages for which tenders were elaborated. The time lost on the tendering procedure can be gained by providing clear TORs to the consortia of consultants that are recruited for the different packages and with appropriate oversight, these can produce more in-depth and detailed products during a required participatory process. Training and communication can be part of their portfolio. Some of the worst practices: i. Confusion about the role and responsibilities of the two executing agencies, NIMOS and EC Cabinet. After the dismantling of the ATM, the execution befell NIMOS and the EC Cabinet, but no clear division of tasks was outlined. NIMOS was supposed to do the execution and EC Cabinet the oversight, but this did not materialize. So, clarity of roles and responsibilities should have been formally agreed upon in a type of MoU before the project execution. ii. Detailed planning of certain crucial aspects in project coordination: stakeholder involvement, communication, capacity development and M&E. A number of necessary elements of project execution were not formalized, but executed haphazardly without a clear action plan and without clear capitalization of results. That makes evaluating these elements very difficult and provides lack of transparency. iii. Allotting all packages of work to only one consortium. Initially, all project activities were meant to be tendered to one consortium of consultants only. This is only a good idea if oversight is stringent and adjustments can be made with authority. Both were not the case in this project. Fortunately, one of the elements – the elaboration of judicial instruments for the Environmental Framework Act – was drawn out of the tender on strong advice from UNDP.
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| Findings | |
| 1. | The project has – to date - been marginally successful in achieving its objectives in terms of key targets, developing an effective platform for harmonization of environmental knowledge and management information systems and the procedures that need to be in place to ensure liberal exchange of high quality data and information. The outputs were produced, at least in advanced draft form: SMIN, Environmental Atlas, Roadmap for Change, Catalog and Decrees for the operationalization of the Environmental Framework Act. The Kaplan reports contain the necessary tools for incorporating environmental issues into spatial planning in order to provide an enabling environment for improving planning and decision-making to achieve global environmental problems. However, these outputs have all not been validated and approved yet as official instruments for environmental governance of the GoS. Since the project has received an extension until June 2019, there still is time for this validation and approval, which will solidify the potential impact of the project. Corrective actions for the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the project The project design was relevant to the national development priorities and the OP 2017, and continues to be of relevance to the current vision on national sustainable development. All respondents to the interviews during the Terminal Evaluation have concurred that harmonization of the environmental knowledge and information systems and digitalization of all information available will assist decision makers in taking better informed decisions about the sustainable use of natural resources and the combat of land degradation, loss of biodiversity and the negative effects of climate change. Although the ProDoc indicated that Adaptive management measures would effectively be taken during project implementation to avoid any delay or disruptions in project implementation, and to enhance project effectiveness, the measures taken were not an undivided success. The implementation arrangements for the project have been changed drastically, from local management with a pool of national consultants, to local supervision with implementation by a consortium of international and national consultants (Kaplan). Supervision mostly organized by a part-time Technical Coordination Expert, who has not been with the project for the full length, and a Project Manager and Senior Advisor detached from NIMOS – who however seemed to retain some of their normal NIMOS tasks. An M&E officer was recruited by NIMOS, who unfortunately resigned before project end and not replaced. This may have contributed to the apparent delay in achievement of the outcomes of the project. No formal Board of Advisors was established to direct the PMU and provide oversight. Along the way, the active participation of one of the Executing Agents, the Environmental Coordination team of the Cabinet to the President was lost, and not regained. Although the project produced a good number of tangible outputs, some elements foreseen in the ProDoc have not been realized; elements that would have helped the project in raising its profile and status as Cross Cutting Capacity Development project. These are: 1) A clear communication strategy: such a strategy would have allowed the project to bank on the achievement of its intermediary outputs (launches, validations of drafts, workshops and trainings, etc.) to further the awareness of the public, fellow institutions and decision makers about the need for stronger environmental governance, including living up to the requirements under the MEA Suriname has ratified, as well as the need for a more performant and harmonized environmental knowledge and information management system. It would have been a quick win to work together with the REDD+ project on the matter. 2) A stakeholder engagement plan: since the project has to deal with a great number of stakeholders, it would have benefitted from a clear plan on how and when to engage each and all of these stakeholders. This could have concluded stakeholder representation of vulnerable groups, such as the Indigenous and Tribal People, whose influence could and should have been stronger in the project, as well as gender and youth groups. Again, since the REDD+ project already has such planning inherent to its processes, it would have been a quick win to join forces on the topic. 3) A capacity building strategy: since capacity building is more than just training, the project could have built on the ProDoc and the experience of the CCCD project elsewhere to design a specific strategy that would involve strengthening the institutions with hardware and applications (as has happened now in the project), as well as coordination of mandates, coaching, peer-to-peer learning, training, HRM (the foreseen HR Transition Plan as outlined in the ProDoc) and educational curriculum building. Proposals for future directions underlining main objectives The consortium of consultants is currently finalizing several of the tangible outputs of the project, one of which is the Sustainable Financing Plan. As noted earlier, the project stakeholders would benefit from a Capacity Development Strategy that provides the SMIN partners with a possibility to continue strengthening their capacities for the years to come – it would be the main purpose of the Sustainable Financing Plan to ensure that the financial means for such capacity building and the operational costs of the SMIN and the web-portal would remain available and a continuous hardware strengthening of various SMIN partners would be possible. SMIN would have to become the hub of all Environmental Knowledge and Information Management activities underway and planned in Suriname, where initiatives like the reporting to the conventions (TNC & NDC, 6th CBD report & GBIF, LDN reporting, etc.), EIA and SEA, etc. would join hands to feed in to the harmonized SMIN web-portal. The latter should not mean that SMIN-secretariat at NIMOS would centralize all the data, but that interfaces would have to be created to ensure that there is liberal information sharing between the data and information custodians in a practically instantaneous fashion (to be agreed upon via MOUs). Hence, reporting to the conventions could be strengthened in speed and quality, and spatial development planning on the national and local level could be done while taking into account potential environmental services, global environmental benefits and impacts. In such a way, decision making about natural resources management and conservation could be done in an informed manner. |
| Recommendations | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Hold a meeting with the project partners to discuss the current state of the Capacity Development Score Card and present the outcomes of the TE |
| 2 | Set up a specific meeting with the CM of the Cabinet to discuss progress and continuation; Portfolio meeting between UNDP and NIMOS can be option to establish technical information flow between 2nd layer NIMOS and CM, mirroring info and contact between management of NIMOS and CM. Need for systematic review of optimization of information flows within and between organizations. |
| 3 | Finalize draft Roadmap for Change, Environment Atlas, Catalogue, Decrees for the Environment Framework Act, Sustainable Financing Plan |
| 4 | Produce cover documents by NIMOS to officialize its interpretation of the Kaplan documents as official government documents with decision making implications. This can be done either as a cover document discussing all of the document or a cover document for each report/document produced. |
| 5 | Present documents to the foreseen partners in the SMIN and ask for their feedback |
| 6 | Establish TOR for web-portal SMIN and hire company to design and make accessible the Portal to SMIN partners and general public |
| 7 | Formalize SMIN – TOR and organize first meeting to outline the way of working together, MOUs, standardization of data/information and the use of the web-portal |
| 8 | Elaborate a Capacity Development Strategy that will incorporate all capacity development achievements during the project, as well as a roadmap for further capacity development after the project closes. This should include the HR Transition Plan as outlined as an important indicator of success in the PRODOC |
| 9 | Adapt the REDD+ Communication Strategy and the Stakeholder Engagement Plan to suit the needs of continuity of the CCCD project |
| 10 | Outline how the CCCD project will put special attention on the gender aspects of the project, as well as the specificities of vulnerable groups, such as youth, children, elderly, IDPs, refugees. Also put particular attention to the involvement of Indigenous and Tribal People and how to ensure their FPIC with regards to use of Indigenous Knowledge (Nagoya Protocol). |
Management Response Documents
1. Recommendation:
Hold a meeting with the project partners to discuss the current state of the Capacity Development Score Card and present the outcomes of the TE
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/05/14]
Accepted. UNDP has discussed with National Implementing partner and agreement to include in annual workplan for the project extension period and carry out during this period
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Invite target audience and host session filling capacity
Development Score Card
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
NIMOS and Environment and Natural Resource Management programme | 2019/03 | Completed | Completed, Capacity Score Card event took place on 11 July History |
2. Recommendation:
Set up a specific meeting with the CM of the Cabinet to discuss progress and continuation; Portfolio meeting between UNDP and NIMOS can be option to establish technical information flow between 2nd layer NIMOS and CM, mirroring info and contact between management of NIMOS and CM. Need for systematic review of optimization of information flows within and between organizations.
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/05/14]
Accepted. UNDP will advocate for setup of portfolio type of systemic information exchange on ongoing Environment and Natural Resource Management projects
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Communicate proposed portfolio information exchange
format and frequency with Coordination Environment and
NIMOS for agreement and implementation.
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Environment and Natural Resource Management programme | 2019/03 | Completed | Completed through adhoc opportunity during the Inception Workshop Suriname 3rd NC to UNFCCC History | |
| Regular portfolio information exchange.
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS, and Environment and Natural Resource Management programme | 2019/06 | Overdue-Not Initiated | Regular exchange yet to be agreed upon. History |
3. Recommendation:
Finalize draft Roadmap for Change, Environment Atlas, Catalogue, Decrees for the Environment Framework Act, Sustainable Financing Plan
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14]
Accepted and discussed with implementing partner and this is part of AWP 2019 during extension period
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finalize, validate and approve draft documents
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/12 | Overdue-Initiated | Ongoing History |
4. Recommendation:
Produce cover documents by NIMOS to officialize its interpretation of the Kaplan documents as official government documents with decision making implications. This can be done either as a cover document discussing all of the document or a cover document for each report/document produced.
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14]
Accepted as follows in that UNDP will follow up with implementing partner and advocate to have as part of project closure a status of documents overview report
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Documents overview report
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/06 | Completed | Completed, UNDP Head of office requested and received verbal confirmation for high level presentation of results History |
5. Recommendation:
Present documents to the foreseen partners in the SMIN and ask for their feedback
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14]
Accepted
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finalize and validate draft documents
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/12 | Overdue-Initiated | Ongoing History | |
| Approved documents disseminated
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/12 | Overdue-Initiated | Ongoing History |
6. Recommendation:
Establish TOR for web-portal SMIN and hire company to design and make accessible the Portal to SMIN partners and general public
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14]
Accepted and already discussed with implementing partner and this is part of AWP 2019 during extension period
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Validate and approve draft ToR including Annex on the
SMIN porta
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/12 | Overdue-Initiated | Ongoing History |
7. Recommendation:
Formalize SMIN – TOR and organize first meeting to outline the way of working together, MOUs, standardization of data/information and the use of the web-portal
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/05/14]
Accepted. This work on SMIN is part of AWP 2019 during extension period
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Implement additional SMIN work program activities
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/06 | Overdue-Initiated | Started and ongoing through multiple streams under coordination of National Institute for Environment and Development in Suriname (NIMOS) and National Bureau of Statistics (ABS). History |
8. Recommendation:
Elaborate a Capacity Development Strategy that will incorporate all capacity development achievements during the project, as well as a roadmap for further capacity development after the project closes. This should include the HR Transition Plan as outlined as an important indicator of success in the PRODOC
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/05/14]
Not accepted. The importance of this recommendation is understood, however given the institutional changes as a result of new Environmental Framework Law for NIMOS and potentially also Coordination Environment legal basis realization and given project duration and funding this recommendation is unattainable. It would require dedicated actions and funding.
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discuss this recommendation with Coordination
Environment and NIMOS and way forward
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/06 | Completed | Completed History |
9. Recommendation:
Adapt the REDD+ Communication Strategy and the Stakeholder Engagement Plan to suit the needs of continuity of the CCCD project
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14]
Accepted and discussed with implementing partner and under implementation
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discuss this recommendation with Coordination
Environment and NIMOS and way forward
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/12 | Overdue-Initiated | To be completed during Q4 2019 History |
10. Recommendation:
Outline how the CCCD project will put special attention on the gender aspects of the project, as well as the specificities of vulnerable groups, such as youth, children, elderly, IDPs, refugees. Also put particular attention to the involvement of Indigenous and Tribal People and how to ensure their FPIC with regards to use of Indigenous Knowledge (Nagoya Protocol).
Management Response: [Added: 2019/05/14]
Accepted
Key Actions:
| Key Action | Responsible | DueDate | Status | Comments | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mainstream into all program and projects
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS and Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2019/06 | Overdue-Initiated | Gender mainstreaming is Ongoing History | |
| Support to National FPIC processes by government of
Suriname and Indigenous and Tribal Peoples is key part of
REDD+ program
[Added: 2019/05/14] [Last Updated: 2019/10/16] |
Coordination Environment, NIMOS with Environment and Natural Resource Management programme support | 2020/06 | Overdue-Initiated | Ongoing History |