Jeneen R. Garcia is an Evaluation Officer at the GEF IEO. She has both coauthored and led evaluations on GEF support for various focal areas, including the cross-cutting themes of multistakeholder partnerships, private sector engagement, environmental and socioeconomic synergies and trade-offs, scaling-up of impacts and behavior change. Since joining the GEF IEO, she has dedicated herself to piloting innovative methodologies that bridge qualitative and quantitative approaches, and that integrate the disciplines of natural sciences, social sciences, and communications with the field of evaluation. She has helped develop conceptual frameworks and tools for assessing impact in complex adaptive systems, among which is the now-mainstreamed GEF Theory of Change Framework.
Her previous work in her native Philippines was in the fields of multistakeholder watershed governance with a bilateral government project, and community-based natural resource management at an environmental law NGO. Jeneen's work at both organizations primarily involved research, education, knowledge management, advocacy, and communications across various media. She also has extensive experience as a former freelance writer, editor, and photographer for different publications.
Jeneen obtained a Joint European MSc in Water and Coastal Management in four European countries through an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Her academic research focused on the scaling-up of management of social-ecological systems, using community-based marine protected areas in the Philippines as case study. She has a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science, and conducted a Master's research in Marine Biology. Jeneen has certificates in evaluation from the International Program on Development Evaluation Training (IPDET), and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She was Program Co-Chair (2019-2021) of the Systems in Evaluation Topical Interest Group (SETIG) of the American Evaluation Association.