4 Measuring the Immeasurable? Global Efforts to Evaluate Harm

Measuring the Immeasurable? Global Efforts to Evaluate HarmGlobal programmes play a crucial role in addressing transnational issues and establishing common norms and policy agendas for delivering global public goods (Stone and Ladi, 2015; Kaul, 2016; Ocampo, 2016; Stone and Moloney, 2019).These programmes, characterized by their multistakeholder, multi-level, and multi-sectoral nature, hold great promise (Glasbergen, Biermann, and Mol, 2007).However, their effectiveness in achieving their goals remains a key question (McQueen and Jones, 2007; Andonova, Faul, and Piselli, 2022).Previous studies have highlighted the need for comprehensive evaluations of these programmes (Heymann et al, 2019; Wessal and Wescott, 2019).This chapter aims to address this gap by examining the monitoring and evaluation of global programmes, focusing on three case studies of gender programmes implemented by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) that seek to eliminate harmful practices by 2030 in line with the Sustainable Development Agenda (SDG, target 5.3).While ambitious in scope and often well-resourced, these programmes face a recurring challenge -their ability to demonstrate clear, measurable added value.Are they delivering on their promise of ending harmful practices, or are they falling short?As Wessal and Wescott (2019, p 529) observed, 'addressing M&E is important for understanding the overlapping jurisdictions, unclear delegation chains, and the challenges of mediating between different stakeholders that characterize these evolving examples of global policy making and transnational administration'.Despite the proliferation of indicators, frameworks, and evaluation efforts, much ambiguity persists regarding the performance 1 of global programmes. 1 Lall (2017, p 257) offers a useful lens to assess the performance of international organization, proposing a framework based on three dimensions: '(1) the achievement of