evalusoef

Conference Issue

Ten years ago, the European Union fixed the concept “sustainable development” as a goal in the EU's treaty of Amsterdam. Ever since then, the relevance of this concept has increased. In 2001, the European Council adopted the European Sustainable Development Strategy. As a reaction to this strategy, the Commission decided, in 2002, that social, economic and ecological impacts of proposals have to be assessed systematically. Since 2005, Impact Assessments (IA) have to be carried out ex-ante for all proposals submitted by the Commission’s Legislative and Work Programme.

Impact Assessments have meanwhile become a “tool”. They are not only used by the Commission to assess potential impacts. Also policy makers, member states, NGOs and businesses working on sustainable development use Impact Assessments to strengthen their arguments and to influence the political decision making process. For example, in the field of energy policy or during the discussions about new regulation of the chemical policy (REACH), IAs were used extensively. Not infrequently, different IAs from different actors have diverging outcomes on the same topic.

Evaluation studies are requested on demand by the Commission, or according to the requirements of several European directives. Most of these are ex-post facto, to judge the impact of measures, programmes and activities and to improve policy-making. The conference, however, follows a broader concept of evaluations and looks at the beginning of a policy cycle (ex-ante assessments), the implementation process (interim evaluation) and at the end of the policy cycle (ex-post evaluations), and asks for implications of such systematic approaches to the concept of sustainable development.

Policy evaluation might support the integration of sustainable development in different policies. However, the concept of sustainable development is multifaceted, and the definition varies with different actors. Concomitantly, there is no precise understanding as to what should be included in an evaluation of sustainability and how it should be conducted. The conference addresses this problem from different perspectives, including the views of evaluators as well as political actors. The latter act as commissioning agents and work with evaluation or assessments results.

Objectives

The conference would like to add to the understanding of sustainability evaluation by especially addressing the following questions:

Target Audience

The conference addresses evaluation practitioners from research and consultancy, academia, commissioners of evaluations, and, especially at the European level, policy makers, interface institutions, and businesses working on sustainable development.

Conference Board

The EPOS-Project

The conference is organised by the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOEW) and Ecologic Institute for International and European Environmental Policy. It is part of the EPOS project (Evaluating Policies for Sustainable Development). EPOS is a research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of socio-ecological research (SOEF). The main focus of the project is policy evaluation with emphasis on sustainability issues. The network is concerned with the evaluation of policies, political strategies, programmes, and instruments.

EPOS-Partners