The Footprint Evaluation Initiative aims to ensure that all evaluations consider environmental sustainability, regardless of whether this is an explicit objective of the project, policy or program being evaluated. This report describes four ‘thought experiments’ undertaken as part of this project.

The thought experiments discussed here involved four very different completed evaluations and were used to explore whether it is relevant, feasible and useful to consider environmental sustainability in evaluation, how this might be done, what challenges and issues it raises, and what is needed to address these.