Sustainable development is back center stage on the international agenda. After the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, sustainable development seemed in vogue for a while but lost ground to a more pragmatic perspective in the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, which embodied practical goals and targets that could be met in 15 years’ time by the international community and by countries. However, the increasing urgency of climate change and related environmental crises such as biodi-versity loss and the growth of chemical and other waste throughout the world caused a recalibration of development processes. This led to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), incorporated into Agenda 2030, which were accepted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. In October 2015, two evaluation conferences took place in parallel in Bangkok, Thailand: one organized by the Independent Evaluation Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the other by the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS). These two confer-ences focused on sustainable development: the UNDP conference on what the newly adopted SDGs meant in terms of development of national capaci-ties, mainly for governments, whether they had the capacity to contribute to understanding progress toward the SDGs, and whether the policies were in place to enable evaluation to play its proper role. The IDEAS conference, on the other hand, focused on the concept of sustainable development and how it could be evaluated, and aimed at bringing best practices and innovation from all over the world to be discussed in Bangkok.