Abstract The state of the environment continues declining despite improved global responses towards environmental protection. This mismatch could be because government policymakers and bureaucrats tend to focus on the tangible and controllable aspects of interventions – such as resources and actions – rather than the consequences of these interventions. We test this assumption by classifying governance indicators in the environmental sector according to a logic model: an evidence-based causal chain articulating the causes, effects and consequences of management interventions. In this paper, we synthesized consensus on logic models and developed a decision tree to classify governance indicators depending on whether they measured inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts. We then applied this decision tree to indicators from the South African government’s national environmental outcomes delivery agreement and found that environmental governance indicators tended to be at the activity or output levels. The shortage of indicators at the outcome level may explain why the state of the environment continues declining despite the environmental sector consistently meeting governance targets. Inappropriately aligned environmental governance indicators mean that officials work on interventions without knowing whether these are effective or not. Therefore, the environmental sector should prioritise the monitoring of the effectiveness of government interventions, rather than the interventions themselves.

中文翻译：

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环境治理指标不一致以及政府行为与积极的环境成果之间的不匹配

摘要 尽管全球对环境保护的反应有所改善，但环境状况仍在继续恶化。这种不匹配可能是因为政府决策者和官僚倾向于关注干预的有形和可控方面——例如资源和行动——而不是这些干预的后果。我们通过根据逻辑模型对环境部门的治理指标进行分类来检验这一假设：以证据为基础的因果链，阐明了管理干预的原因、影响和后果。在本文中，我们综合了逻辑模型的共识，并开发了一个决策树，根据治理指标是否衡量输入、活动、输出、结果和影响进行分类。然后，我们将此决策树应用于南非政府国家环境成果交付协议中的指标，发现环境治理指标往往处于活动或产出水平。尽管环境部门一直在实现治理目标，但结果层面指标的缺乏可以解释为什么环境状况继续下降。不恰当地调整环境治理指标意味着官员在不知道这些干预是否有效的情况下进行干预。因此，环境部门应优先监测政府干预措施的有效性，而不是干预措施本身。