Environmental Policy Evaluation in the EU: Advancing the Governance View

Given the pressures of ‘better/smart’ regulation, austerity and the perceived need to improve policies in the EU, policy evaluation has received growing prominence and resources, particularly in the environment and climate change areas. Evaluation is the “careful retrospective assessment of the merit, worth, and value of administration, output and outcome of government interventions” (Vedung 1997). While there are entire journals and many books on evaluation methodology and approaches, we know little about everyday practices and governance of evaluation in EU environment policy. Recent work has focused on the politics of evaluation (Bovens et al. 2006, Hayward et al. 2013), and on the distribution and nature of climate policy evaluation (Haug et al. 2010, Huitema et al. 2011, Hildén et al. 2014, Hildén 2014). But it has not yet conceptualized evaluation in broader governance terms. There is thus an urgent need to (1) build a better theory-driven and empirically-informed knowledge base of evaluation activities; (2) understand how evaluation fits into larger governance systems; and (3) explore how to ‘govern’ evaluation itself. In order to address these gaps, this paper takes these three key areas and, in relation to empirical patterns of EU climate policy evaluation, develops novel avenues for future research. First, it reviews what we know about climate policy evaluation, focusing on the main actors and the empirical distribution of evaluation activity. Second, it draws on Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance theory to highlight one prominent governance approach (Jordan et al., 2015; Ostrom, 2014) where evaluation has been insufficiently theorized, and highlights what innovations could plug this gap. Third, the paper reviews thinking on evaluation governance, focusing on formal/informal evaluation (Huitema et al., 2011), as well as monocentric/polycentric evaluation. Finally, the paper looks across these three areas to open up crucial research questions on the ‘governance view’ of environmental policy evaluation.