The challenges of monitoring national climate policy: learning lessons from the EU

One of the most central and novel features of the new climate governance architecture emerging from the 2015 Paris Agreement is the transparency framework committing countries to provide, inter alia, regular progress reports on national pledges to address climate change. Many countries will rely on public policies to turn their pledges into action. This article focuses on the EU’s experience with monitoring national climate policies in order to understand the challenges that are likely to arise as the Paris Agreement is implemented around the world. To do so, the research employs – for the first time – comparative empirical data submitted by states to the EU’s monitoring system. Our findings reveal how the EU’s predominantly technical interpretation of four international reporting quality criteria – an approach borrowed from reporting on GHG fluxes – has constrained knowledge production and stymied debate on the performance of individual climate policies. Key obstacles to more in-depth reporting include not only political concerns over reporting burdens and costs, but also struggles over who determines the nature of climate policy monitoring, the perceived usefulness of reporting information, and the political control that policy knowledge inevitably generates. Given the post-Paris drive to achieve greater transparency, the EU’s experience offers a sobering reminder of the political and technical challenges associated with climate policy monitoring, challenges that are likely to bedevil the Paris Agreement for decades to come

The politicisation of evaluation: constructing and contesting EU policy performance

Although systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy “effectiveness” (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and finally, evaluation purpose and use (including the relationships between discourse and scientific evidence, political attitudes and strategic use). The special issue considers how each of these elements contributes to an evolving governance system in the EU, where evaluation is playing an increasingly important role in decision making

Evaluation systems: what are they and why study them?

Increasingly, in the world of evaluation, `systems of evaluation' have been developed.this article outlines four criteria that help characterize such systems. One criterion is the existence of a distinctive epistemological perspective; another is that, in order to be labelled a system, evaluation activities are carried out by evaluators within organizational structures and institutions and not only (or largely) by `lonely' or sole-trader evaluators. Permanence is the third criterion and the fourth is that there is a focus on the intended use of results of evaluations. Examples of systems are the performance-monitoring system, the `experimentalist' system and the evaluation-accreditation system. Several problematic aspects of these systems are described, making it relevant to study them. One of these is the danger that evaluation systems breed (new) evaluation systems.another problem is that these systems may produce largely routinized information relevant for day-to-day practices and single-loop learning processes, but which is of little relevance for fundamental reassessments of policies and programmes