It would be needed by evince as can be seen in:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/evince/tree/configure.ac
        # Evince has a rather soft run-time dependency on hicolor-icon-theme.
        # If the hicolor theme is not available, Evince fails to display some
        # icons. Because we cannot check for it at run-time, we instead
        # would like to require the icon theme at compile-time. But, because
        # the hicolor-icon-theme does not have a pkgconfig file, on gnome we
        # require the gnome icon theme instead.
        SHELL_PLATFORM_PKGS="gnome-icon-theme >= $GNOME_ICON_THEME_REQUIRED"
        # The totem-screensaver and egg_smclient code use x11 directly.
        SHELL_PLATFORM_PKGS="$SHELL_PLATFORM_PKGS x11"
        ;;

Could you please provide a pkgconfig file if possible?

Thanks