The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) plays a critical role in advancing the credibility of UNDP’s programme support and sustainable development. Providing an overview of IEO’s evaluation activities, this paper describes its mandate and approach in supporting accountability within UNDP and in building countries’ national evaluation capacities. Specifically, it suggests there is a need for investment in evaluation for greater development effectiveness at the country level. The paper illustrates challenges in linking national evaluation and Agenda 2030, and IEO’s initiatives to support countries in diagnosing their evaluation capacities. It suggests the efforts of the United Nations should focus on addressing institutional and process issues to accelerate evaluation capacities. To this end, the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG), as an interagency professional network, with its tools and expertise, should undertake advocacy efforts to advance the role of evaluation in the SDG follow up and review process.

  In this paper co-authors present the global trends on Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD), Japan’s contribution to ECD through ODA, ECD in partner countries and their challenges. Based on these observations, they discuss ECD in SDGs era.

  The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its “leave no one behind” motto and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for ECD in developing countries and new evaluation methodologies such as participatory evaluation. These are opportunities as well as challenges for everyone concerned in evaluation. The needs for ECD in developing countries are huge and in order for them to take advantage of these opportunities, the support for ECD from donors including Japan are indispensable.

  One of the prominent difficulties of SDG evaluation is rooted in its highly-abstract and quality-based conceptual targets. The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to capture the SDG conceptual targets in the context of evaluation for global cooperation and to examine feasibility of “local-formative evaluation,” which appears in the framework.

  Some of the SDG conceptual targets are difficult to measure by existing evaluation indicators. Therefore, it is necessary to shift an emphasis of our discussion from measurability to evaluability. In order to increase evaluability, abstract global goals and targets need to be localized by considering its own social context. This study focuses on ESD of SDG4.7 as a typical representative of the SDG conceptual targets and employs an action research method to analyze a case of ESD evaluation at a public primary school. This action research reveals the significance of theory evaluation as “local-formative evaluation,” which promotes co-productive management at the practical level.

  The 7th Goal of the SDGs is aiming at ensuring access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy for all. The difficulty to evaluate this goal is that use of energy is not an end objective of economic activities. Energy is being used to generate some outcomes, which must be targets of other goals though, the SDGs doesn’t show any program theory of input, output, outcome relationship across the targets which requires inputs of energy. This article tries to construct a program theory by (1) analysing the concept of the Energy Intensity which 7th Goal deems as a key indicator for improving energy efficiency and by (2) analysing effects of introduction of solar power system, as recommended by the 7th Goal, in rural villages in Myanmar and Tanzania. The study suggests that while there are huge welfare gains for people through introduction of solar power system, the 7th Goal is best evaluated together with other goals and on how efficiently and sustainably these goals are achieved. This article further argues that basic indicators such as GDP should be improved to capture welfare and sustainability. It must be one of new challenges for goals after SDGs.

  The OECD-DAC has revised new evaluation criteria for the first time in about 30 years to reflect the SDGs philosophy adopted by the United Nations in 2015.

  Since some of the terms newly introduced in the new evaluation criteria in English are conceptual, the evaluator should apply them after correctly interpreting the significance of these terms without being bound by the old dictionary-like stereotypes.

  In this paper, taking up four terms (Equity, Human Rights, Resilience, Coherence) that the interpretation of terms is likely to be of ambiguity, insufficiency, or misunderstanding, the author shows the points to be noted together with the actual use of each term.

  Ex-ante evaluation is usually conducted for the purpose of evaluating the contents and feasibility of a proposed plan for initiating a new project. However, there is observed increasing cases of SDGs-related projects which involve trans-disciplinary or multi-sectoral arrangements and which require delicate qualitative judgements on their outcome, necessitating ex-ante evaluation based on deliberate application of evaluative thinking from the planning stage. The present case report presents an ex-ante evaluation the author conducted which relied on J. Owen’s framework of Proactive evaluation in order to combine planning and evaluation upfront. The two lessons learned from this case are the importance of practicing stakeholder dialogues from the initial stage of project conception and the possibility to effectively combine qualitative data collection methods such as interviews and focus groups with collective data-generating methods like workshops.

  Social Impact Measurement（SIM）can be regarded as a type of program evaluation method that has been developed in the context of social business and social investment. SIM is an attempt to apply the knowledge accumulated in the program evaluation to social enterprises, corporate activities, and investment activities to use it as a method to evaluate their social impact. However, the definition and relevance of SIM to program evaluation have not been sufficiently clarified. In recent years, the market size of social enterprises and social investments has been expanding significantly, and it is expected to become a major part of evaluation practice in the future. In this paper, we will examine how these SIM efforts were formed, how they are positioned in the theories of program evaluation by summarizing the relevant facts, and discuss how the practice and theoretical development of SIM can contribute to evaluation studies.

  The Plan to Accept 300,000 International Students achieved its target in 2019. In this paper, the Plan is evaluated considering its relation with the upper policy (Growth Strategy) and related measures/projects such as globalization of universities.

  As the result of analysis, it was found out that globalization of universities led to the increase of international students in English-taught degree programs, especially at the graduate level. However, many of them found difficulty in finding employment in Japan because of the lack of Japanese language ability.

  The main contributors to achieve the target of 300,000 international students are Japanese language schools. Since their student recruitment and educational activities have not been monitored enough by the government, it led to the increase of international students who are busy with part-time jobs and cannot concentrate in study.

  Though the target number was achieved, the main purposes of the Plan (increase of excellent international students and their employment in Japan) are not fulfilled from this regard.

  In recent years, educators have been crying out for an effective and practical theory of assessment to improve teaching and learning, i.e., formative assessment. Such assessment has been criticized, however, for its fragile theoretical foundation and limited applicability to practice, both of which arise from the failure to incorporate socio-cultural perspectives when constructing theory. This study, therefore, proposes a new theoretical framework for socio-cultural formative assessment, based on a discussion of John Dewey’s theory of valuation. An explanatory model was thus obtained in which feedback as a practical judgment is generated by teachers living in a particular community. These teachers make factual and value judgments informed by their observations and create ends-in-view while exercising emotions (desire, interest, and effort). Formative assessment, which can be treated as a process of practical judgment, is a cultural practice of a specific community with the potential to qualitatively change the entire school education system. This can be achieved by relativizing educational values, bridging gaps between educational activities and ends-in-view for the transformation of both the individual and the group.