Some mixed results may be attributed in part to the long exposure period applied across the evaluation. This evaluation, which spanned over a decade, had a long exposure period that was consistent across the entire evaluation. While long exposure periods are necessary for evaluations to fully capture the economic benefits of land projects, they may come at a cost to assessing other outcomes and deriving lessons learned. Noting that this was a complex evaluation, it is possible that different streams may have benefitted from different exposure periods. For example, this evaluation did not report positive findings around interventions designed to raise legal awareness around land rights. This might be because these outreach activities were done nearly 15 years ago, so it is difficult to imagine a positive impact across such a long timeframe. By shortening the exposure period for some evaluations, this would reduce the recall period for certain outcomes and provide clearer results. In addition, the assessment of sustainability may also have been affected by the exposure period. The evaluation noted that vehicles and other equipment provided by the project were no longer in use, and the evaluation interpreted this as a reflection of the overall sustainability of the project. However, the exposure period of the evaluation exceeded the useful life of these physical assets, thus it should have been expected that they would be no longer be functioning. In the future, evaluation planning should consider that long exposure periods may reduce some the learning value of the evaluation in some respects, and weigh the associated tradeoffs accordingly.
Lesson Learned