Becoming a party to an international treaty, convention, agreement or protocol places states under a set of legally binding commitments. These commitments often include regular reporting on national implementation to the relevant secretariats. However, such international instruments frequently touch on overlapping areas. This demands careful coordination to ensure that implementation is coherent, exploits synergies, and avoids gaps and conflicts. It also opens up the possibility of combining evaluation and reporting for several agreements, saving time and resources as well as providing additional insights into the overall coherence and effectiveness of implementation.

In 2011 the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Division...

The methodology builds on several existing guidelines and methods for the implementation evaluations, including the Manual on Compliance with and Enforcement of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (Bruch and Mrema 2006) and Auditing the Implementation of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs): A Primer for Auditors (UNEP 2010), along with previous reviews of MEA implementation. A full description of the methodology can be found in Peterson et al. (2012).

The review framework examines 15 categories, each of which describes a different aspect of good governance would enable effective implementation of the cluster of MEAs (see Annex 2 and table 1). These address two aspects...

The methodology was tested in Estonia in January—December 2013. The first phase, from January to September, consisted of a review of publicly available documents (national reports, monitoring reports, statistics, etc.); communication with the national focal points and other stakeholders for additional information; and compilation of a draft report. In October, the review team invited the national focal points for the various MEAs (see Annex 1) and other stakeholders to a meeting in order to verify the data and findings, and also to receive feedback on the review methodology. The report was then finalized based on input from this meeting....

The testing in Tanzania was carried out between January 2013 and June 2014. Two main methods of data collection were used: literature review of publicly available documents (e.g. national reports submitted by Tanzania to the Conference of the Parties; policies; project documents; national strategies and plans) and face-to-face meetings through a stakeholder workshop on 4 March 2014 with the national focal points (see Annex 1), NGOs and public authorities, which was organized to verify the data and findings as well as to receive feedback on the study usability and ways for improvement of the review methodology.

Tanzania was found to...

Overall, the testing exercises in Estonia and Tanzania indicated that the methodology can be useful for reviewing the coherence and effectiveness of implementation of clusters of related MEAs, and is relatively easy to use. It yields information that can be valuable both at national level to review policy and practice, and for monitoring of national performance by the global secretartiats of the individual MEAs. It also provides meaningful results even with relatively scant data, giving countries some flexibility in how much time and resources they invest — although more comprehensive evidence-gathering processes clearly produce better audits. If the methodology is...