Evaluation of climate policy is rocketing but in an ‘undeveloped and unsystematic’ way, according to new study

A new paper by researchers in Tyndall shines new light on the little studied but politically important practices of climate policy evaluation in Europe.

In the last decade or so the politics surrounding the development of new policies has attracted unprecedented attention.  Many new targets and policies have been adopted, often after intense haggling. But a lot less is known about what is being done to check that the resulting policies are actually delivering on their promises.

Published in the international journal Policy Sciences, an analysis by researchers in Tyndall offers the very first systematic cataloging of the emerging patterns of policy evaluation undertaken in different parts of the European Union.

It reveals that a culture of evaluation is emerging: the number of evaluations produced has grown spectacularly in recent years - data collected for six EU states and for the EU as a whole revealed no less than an eightfold increase in the number of evaluation reports produced in the period 2000–2005.

However, the detailed practices of evaluation remain very uneven.  For example, policies in the UK are much more intensively evaluated than those in Portugal and Poland, for example.  The majority of the 259 evaluations identified also adopt a relatively narrow selection of evaluation tools and lack much stakeholder involvement.  Crucially, over 80% are uncritical i.e. they take existing policy goals as given rather than exploring alternatives.

“Whether climate governance is undertaken through the UN system or – as now seems more likely – via informal ‘pledge and review’ type processes, evaluation practices are absolutely crucial for fine tuning policy interventions and building and sustaining public trust” explained one of the lead authors, Professor Andrew Jordan (Tyndall).

“The most striking finding of our analysis is just how undeveloped and unsystematic are most current evaluation practices” he explained.  “Great efforts have been made to inform and understand policy making procedures in Europe, but policy evaluation still seems to be taking place in an ad hoc and non-participatory fashion”.

As the political pressure on policy makers to describe and explain what is being done to tackle climate change increases, calls will grow for evaluation to be undertaken in a more open and transparent fashion.  “At present, policy systems in Europe seem ill-prepared to rise to that challenge” he explained.

The research was funded by the EU FP6 ADAM integrated project, which UEA coordinated between 2006 and 2009.