Background
Evaluation – a rising star
Policy evaluation has received increasing attention and gained considerable relevance during the past years. In particular in the field of the environment, problems to be solved and political solutions proposed for these problems are becoming more and more complex, and mutual interdependencies with other policy areas are increasingly taken into account. The drive towards "better regulation" at the European and national level has promoted evidence-based decision making and learning policy approaches. In this context, the necessity of evaluating policies, i.e. of dedicating specific efforts to analysing the actual effects of policies, is increasingly recognised. Only if the impacts of policies and policy instruments are known can policy learning take place, and unwanted developments changed or corrected at an early stage in the implementation process. Evaluation adds to the legitimacy and transparency of policy-making and can help to improve, to justify and to explain policies.
Under the framework of sustainable development, the evaluation of social and ecological impacts of policies plays a central role. Therefore, the network dedicates specific attention to these issues.
Policy evaluation can be applied at different stages in the policy cycle:
- Ex-ante evaluations (e.g. impact assessments) examine the potential impacts of an action. The results of ex-ante evaluations can become an integral part of decision making.
- Process evaluations examine the impact of an action while it is being implemented, with the aim of improving or adjusting a measure.
- Ex-post evaluations examine the impacts of actions after they have been implemented, with a view towards revision of policies.
Several standardised evaluation and impact assessment procedures are in place at different administrative levels. These include Sustainability Impact Assessments (SIA) for trade negotiations at EU level, Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIA) in some EU Member States, the European Commission’s Impact Assessment (IA) procedure, or the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA) required by EU Directives. Evaluation and assessment elements are also widespread in non-standardised procedures and are considered in political decision-making, e.g. for supporting specific instruments, programmes, or policy areas.
Evaluation and social-ecological research
The need to move from evaluation that is focused on specific areas (e.g. environmental or economic impacts) towards more integrated sustainability assessments and evaluations is broadly acknowledged in policy evaluation research and practice. In EPOS, evaluation research is embedded in the context of social-ecological research.
Both integrated policy evaluation and social-ecological research are based on the concept of sustainability and motivated by the insight that ecological, social and economic aspects need to be taken into account in order to find viable solutions for the development of human societies. Evaluation can be a key tool to support sustainable development and to prevent policy measures in one area from causing unwanted impacts in another.
The social-ecological research initiative has developed quality criteria for transdisciplinary research, which may offer recommendations for evaluations in sustainability contexts.
Improving sustainable policy evaluation – the EPOS work programme
The EPOS network discusses and compares policy evaluation approaches both from a research perspective and with a view to improving and applying evaluation procedures in practice. At the centre of discussions are evaluation methods and feedback processes between evaluation and policy development. The following topics have been chosen as focus areas for the network discussions:
- Methodological Challenges of Evaluations
- Evaluation and learning in the context of different administrative systems and political cultures
- Policy impact of evaluation
- Interdisciplinarity and sustainability
- Integrating stakeholders in the integration process
- Quality of evaluation
- Institutional aspects of evaluation
Our project intends:
- to consider policy evaluation from a social-ecological perspective, and
- to influence the practice of policy evaluation through applying the approach and experience of social-ecological research.
