Monitoring and Evaluation Use in Climate Change Adaptation: Insights from a Study of Australian Local Governments

Communities across Australia are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, with more intense rainfall events and storms, more frequent flooding, hotter temperatures in summer, longer droughts and more severe, deadly bushfires. As the impacts from climate change worsen, the demand for climate adaptation increases across all levels of government and sectors of society, yet successful adaptation is a contested concept and difficult to measure. Local governments are fundamental to adapting successfully and are actively developing and implementing climate adaptation strategies, but this raises questions about the impact of their efforts. Monitoring and evaluation are crucial to robust, dynamic decision-making. They help demonstrate progress in adaptation, enhance understanding, and facilitate the scaling up of successful adaptation actions. While much attention has focused on developing indicators and methods to track adaptation, there is scant evidence of how monitoring and evaluation are implemented and importantly how the information gleaned is used in adaptation processes. This thesis addresses that deficiency by examining the implementation and use of monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation and investigating what that tells us about the prospects for climate change adaptation, based on the experience of Australian local government. It undertakes empirical research using a mixed methods research design, incorporating a scoping study and case study research. The scoping study includes a national survey of Australian local governments and semi-structured interviews with selected survey respondents. The focus of the in-depth case study research are two Victorian local governments, City of Melbourne and Basdon City Council. Each case study is applying different approaches to implementing monitoring and evaluation of their climate adaptation strategies and actions. The thesis contends that local governments’ monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation is immature and narrowly focused on demonstrating accountability, which is restricting their potential to contribute to knowledge of what works, for whom, in which contexts and to catalyse successful adaptation. Further, it argues that monitoring and evaluation by local governments are shaped by nested institutions at global and state levels, which constrain the evaluative capacity of local government organisations. Importantly, the role of monitoring in decision-making and learning is far greater than evaluation, raising questions about the validity of making evaluative judgements for climate adaptation based on monitoring data alone. The key contributions of the thesis lie in translating evaluation theory concepts to climate change adaptation policy, and in so doing, adding monitoring and evaluation detail to theories of climate adaptation policy and providing a new perspective on the barriers to successful adaptation. The thesis also extends existing evaluation theory through explicitly examining the use and influence of monitoring, distinct from evaluation. Finally, it documents current practice of monitoring and evaluation of climate adaptation in local governments in Australia, contributing empirical insights into how monitoring and evaluation are enacted, including monitoring and evaluation’s role in the adaptation policy process at the local level.<p></p>