External Evaluator Sustainable Diets and Climate Change Programme

About the job

Background

The environmental case to urgently reduce meat and dairy in the average diet in high-income, industrialised countries has never been clearer. The question is not whether diet change is needed, but how to chart the most successful, ambitious path to change. Repeated academic and policy findings have identified that policymakers and food businesses – and their investors – must make the active, sustained, context-specific interventions needed to accelerate this shift. This is particularly pertinent for retailers, who control at least 90% of the groceries market share in the UK and the Netherlands, and ultimately supply the majority of citizens with their food.

In 2021, Feedback has launched a scorecard that ranked the top 10 retailers based on their efforts to reduce emissions and meat and dairy sales. One year into the project, an evaluation framework was developed, and an evaluation was performed by an external evaluator. In the second, and last year, an extended scorecard was developed and launched in the Netherlands by Feedback EU, in France by CAN-France, and in Denmark by the Danish Vegetarian Society and Green Transition Denmark. Following that, a more specific scorecard (in the form of a bingo card) was launched in the summer of 2023 by Feedback Global in the UK and Feedback EU in the Netherlands. In the last months of 2023, scorecards will be published in Poland by Green REV institute and in Spain by CECU.

Objectives & Project Outcomes

Feedbacks’ programme of work on less and better meat and dairy in supermarkets, funded by the Oak Foundation aims to tackle the root causes of normalised over-consumption of meat and dairy. In doing so, Feedback aims to demonstrate the power of retailers across the supply chain and their influence on consumer choices, as well as the global implications of industrial meat production vis-à-vis the production of animal feed (soy). Specific objectives and outcomes of this project are:

Objective 1: 15 supermarkets across 6 countries adopt corporate policies and in-store practices which incentivise and normalise lower meat and dairy consumption and promote healthy, plant-based eating and better meat and dairy.

Objective 2: An EU partner network, coordinated by Feedback and comprising 20 organisations (campaigning partners and advisory committee) across the UK and 5 EU countries, is set up and capacity is built to deliver scorecard rankings with the biggest supermarkets in each country, to deliver effective corporate engagement and to roll out national campaigns to encourage supermarkets to take specific steps towards less and better meat and dairy.

Objective 3: The EU partner network encourages a movement with different stakeholders from civil society, frontrunner companies, institutional investors and (local) government authorities to transform Europe’s food system, starting to change the consumption level by addressing the food environment via retail, while business and government reforms shift consumption patterns, improving health and reducing agricultural systems’
environmental impacts.

Objective 4: Under this objective we will strengthen and deploy Feedback’s fundraising capacity, in order to develop our profile with funders, strengthen our fundraising processes, including between our UK and EU offices and in our work with scorecard partners, and ultimately secure further funding for this project and Feedback’s wider work on less and better meat consumption, as well as wider food system issues. We will strengthen our staff’s skills and knowledge, and support ongoing fundraising through access to resources such as the Directory of Social Change.

Methodology & Expertise

We are seeking an External Evaluator to conduct a utilisation-focused evaluation (UFE) of this programme of work to determine how this project reaches its objectives. Following a mid-term evaluation in December 2021 we have an existing evaluation framework which can be updated and applied to this evaluation process. The methodology will include a desk-based review and interviews with key informants internally and externally. We are seeking proposals from skilled evaluators, ideally with experience in campaigning, corporate influencing and/or policy and advocacy in the environmental sector.

Outcomes & Timeline

The utilisation-focused evaluation is intended to take the form of a brief report on the extent to which Feedback’s project has reached its objectives as detailed above. This will include a profile of the strengths and weaknesses of how effectively the project has done and recommendations
for future projects.

To best incorporate learnings from this report into the project’s future planning, Feedback envisages the timeline as follows:
December 2023: start the evaluation
End January 2024: draft report
Mid Febuary 2024: final report