Effective management of global climate change and its impacts requires dedicated subnational (i.e., state-level) responses within countries. To ensure that
state-level programs effectively advance the goals of sustainable development,
they must be evaluated by three criteria: compliance with the goals of higher
authorities, efficacy, and credibility. This article offers some preliminary evaluation criteria for assessing these activities and assesses the need for their further
refinement. The authors suggest how to operationalize these criteria to ensure
that state-level efforts encompass the causes and consequences ofglobal climate
change, and they prescribe who should undertake such policy evaluation. They
conclude that good evaluation requires transparent, usable data on energy
consumption and emissions broken down at the regional level; adoption of
evaluation goals appropriate to a country's level of development that have the
concurrence of subnational regions; and external evaluation by nongovernmental organizations, particularly scientists, to ensure independence and
credibility.
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