The Resilience, Sustainable Energy and Marine Biodiversity (RESEMBID) Programme, a EUR 39.6 million EU‑funded initiative implemented by Expertise France under the 11th European Development Fund (EDF 11), was created to help 12 Caribbean OCTs (Anguilla, Aruba, Bonaire, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Curaçao, Montserrat, Saba, Saint Barthélemy, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten, and Turks and Caicos Islands) strengthen environmentally sustainable human development across resilience, sustainable energy and marine biodiversity, including a COVID‑19 response facility.
Integrated Risk Management Associates (IRMA) was commissioned to conduct the final evaluation of RESEMBID, assessing its performance and distilling lessons for future regional initiatives.
The evaluation aimed to:
- Provide an independent assessment of performance against the OECD DAC criteria of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability, across all RESEMBID pillars and the COVID‑19 facility.
- Examine how far the Programme has reduced vulnerability and strengthened resilience, increased energy efficiency and green growth, and improved protection and sustainable management of marine biodiversity in the 12 OCTs.
- Generate actionable learning on RESEMBID’s technical cooperation model, including ownership, regional cooperation, and the suitability of applying a common approach across diverse OCT contexts.
IRMA’s work is designed to surface both results and the deeper system shifts that RESEMBID may have triggered in policies, institutions and regional collaboration.
To do this, the team is applied a mixed‑methods evaluation anchored in a detailed evaluation matrix and theory‑of‑change lens.
Key elements of IRMA’s contribution included:
- A comprehensive portfolio review of all 47 RESEMBID projects, examining alignment with OCT priorities, project performance, cost–benefit patterns and documented outcomes across resilience, energy and marine biodiversity.
- Extensive stakeholder engagement, including a perception survey and at least 68 key informant interviews with implementing partners, national focal points, RESEMBID staff, EU and Expertise France, regional actors and evaluators.
- In‑depth geographic case studies in six OCTs (Sint Maarten, Saba, Anguilla, Montserrat, Cayman Islands and Curaçao) selected to reflect different administering countries, development levels, hurricane exposure and project mixes, enabling observation of tangible outcomes and context-specific lessons.
IRMA’s methodology places particular emphasis on questions that OCT stakeholders and programme staff themselves identified as critical, such as the validity and efficiency of the technical cooperation model, levels of OCT ownership, and how RESEMBID managed contextual constraints and assumptions.
The evaluation delivered:
- An Inception Report that refines the evaluation questions, methods, sampling and workplan and synthesizes early insights, including on the RESEMBID theory of change and its assumptions.
- A set of validated findings, shared through a participatory “data party” with programme stakeholders to co-interpret evidence on results, enablers, barriers and unexpected effects.
- A Final Evaluation Report with conclusions and recommendations to inform EU and Expertise France decisions on future programming with OCTs, including the design of follow‑on mechanisms such as the RESEMBID‑OCT Hub.
Through this assignment, IRMA helped partners understand what RESEMBID has achieved, where and why it has been more or less successful, and how future investments can better match the realities and ambitions of Caribbean OCTs.
IRMA’s team for this assignment included Lezlie Moriniere, Marilise Turnbull, Danielle Evanson and Lutece Cannelle M. The report has yet not been released by Expertise France for public consumption but more information about RESEMBID can be found here: RESEMBID
Photo by Caroline Ross on Unsplash.
