Gender equality in local economic development in Scotland, case study for the international project W.IN D. – Women in Development

As one of the partners of the research consortium, EPRC was in charge of the elaboration of a case study on Scotland to identify and analyse: (i) practical experiences with strategies to support the participation of women in local development processes, and (ii) practical experiences with strategies to support the introduction of the principle of gender mainstreaming into local development processes

Italy at 150 : still a divided society - has the italian state given up on the Mezzogiorno?

As Italy celebrates 150 years of life as a unified State, it remains a divided country. Notwithstanding decades of explicit regional policies and the constitutional commitment that all Italian citizens have equal rights, access to essential services and minimum living standards irrespective of where they live, not just the North-South divide remains sizeable but its overcome may be challenged even further by recent political, institutional and economic developments. The present paper focuses on the most recent phase of Italian regional development policy - known as the nuova programmazione - and shows that a primary factor in determining the disappointing performance of Italian regional policy in this phase has been a lack of political commitment. It will also demonstrate that, beyond the rhetoric on the importance of the Mezzogiorno, in reality the goal of the development and catching up of this area is not a primary aim of the current Government’s agenda

Taking stock of structural funds implementation : current challenges and future opportunities

This paper highlights several themes which have informed programme management since IQ-Net meeting in June 2002, held in Lulea, Sweden. First, it provides an overview of the main development in programme implementation and the financial execution of programmes, including an exploration of the risks of automatic decommitment faced by the programmes. Second, it describes the progress made with the mid-term evaluations, following on the IQ-Net thematic paper on this subject presented at the Lulea conference. Third, it presents an overview of the current EU-level debate on simplification, highlighting the views of the network's partners as well as, where available, the member state

Programmes at the turning point. Challenges, activities and developments for partner regions : September 2003-March 2004

This paper looks at structural funds programmes and a range of issues relating to the mid-term of the programmes, with the completion of the mid-term evaluations, the development of proposals for allocating the performance reserve and the mid term review

The effectiveness of cohesion policy implementation : conflicting accountabilities and accountability/efficiency trade-offs

Paper detailing the effectiveness of Cohesion policy implementation and the conflicting accountabilities and accountability/efficiency trade-offs

The new ambitions for 2014-2020 European structural and investment funds evaluation : pouring water in a leaking container?

One of the recurring criticisms that have been levied to EU Cohesion policy has been its inability to prove its effectiveness and value for money. These criticisms, and the parallel growing pressures to reduce the resources assigned to the policy in recent rounds of budget negotiations, have led to the introduction of changes in the regulatory obligations attached to funding. In the 2014-2020 regulations, efforts to improve the policy’s effectiveness have primarily related to a set of new obligations intended to improve the results-orientation of programme design and implementation, and to a strengthening of the purposefulness of evaluation activities, including through a shift from evaluating implementation to appraising impacts. This article focuses on the latter theme. It reviews the main evaluation obligations foreseen by the Common Provisions Regulations (CPR) and the change in evaluation focus advocated by DG REGIO, the preparation of Evaluation Plans in selected EU programmes and these plans’ coverage, focus, objectives and resources. The article concludes with some reflections on the challenges that the new regulatory framework entails for managing authorities. It argues that the new CPR and Commission guidance notes are addressing past weaknesses by adding new demands to old ones without having sufficiently addressed the problems behind the partly ineffectual responses to already existing requirements, and calls for a stock-taking exercise in order to appreciate what is working, what is not working and what is needed to make evaluation a real programme management and accountability tool

Devolution and the governance of cohesion policy: reflections on changes in accountability

European cohesion policy has undergone substancial changes in all EU member states over the past three decades and a new, devolved governance has become a key feature of this policy. This paper presents the preliminary conclusions of an ongoing research on the changing accountability of European Cohesion Policy in Italy and Scotland

2014-2020 EU cohesion policy : results-orientation through better monitoring

Against the background of the new regulatory framework, this article reviews the varied experiences of selected programmes across the EU – the programmes that are part of the IQ-Net knowledge exchange network - with the fulfilment of the new monitoring requirements. The article is based on secondary source research and fieldwork interviews carried out in all the IQ-Net partner countries and regions with Managing Authorities and Intermediate Bodies, as well as an interview with the European Commission (DG REGIO). It starts with a review of the new monitoring obligations, and their rationale against the background of changed regulatory provisions. It then goes on to discuss the new monitoring arrangements in IQ-Net partner programmes, including the changes introduced to monitoring indicators and systems, the selection of results indicators, the main issues with the design and operation of the 2014-2020 monitoring systems, the challenges that remain to be addressed, as well as the additional efforts undertaken to supplement monitoring data with administrative and survey data, to better serve the needs of evaluation. Some concluding reflections are provided at the end of this paper

Theoretical modeling of dual-frequency scatterometer response: improving ocean wind and rainfall effects

Ocean surface wind is a key parameter of the Earth’s climate system. Occurring at the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere, ocean winds modulate fluxes of heat, moisture and gas exchanges. They reflect the lower branch of the atmospheric circulation and represent a major driver of the ocean circulation. Studying the long-term trends and variability of the ocean surface winds is of key importance in our effort to understand the Earth’s climate system and the causes of its changes. More than three decades of surface wind data are available from spaceborne scatterometer/radiometer missions and there is an ongoing effort to inter-calibrate all these measurements with the aim of building a complete and continuous picture of the ocean wind variability. Currently, spaceborne scatterometer wind retrievals are obtained by inversion algorithms of empirical Geophysical Model Functions (GMFs), which represent the relationship between ocean surface backscattering coefficient and the wind parameters. However, by being measurement-dependent, the GMFs are sensor-specific and, in addition, they may be not properly defined in all weather conditions. This may reduce the accuracy of the wind retrievals in presence of rain and it may also lead to inconsistencies amongst winds retrieved by different sensors. Theoretical models of ocean backscatter have the big potential of providing a more general and understandable relation between the measured microwave backscatter and the surface wind field than empirical models. Therefore, the goal of our research is to understand and address the limitations of the theoretical modeling, in order to propose a new strategy towards the definition of a unified theoretical model able to account for the effects of both wind and rain. In this work, it is described our approach to improve the theoretical modeling of the ocean response, starting from the Ku-band (13.4 GHz) frequency and then broadening the analysis at C-band (5.3 GHz) frequency. This research has revealed the need for new understanding of the frequency-dependent modeling of the surface backscatter in response to the wind-forced surface wave spectrum. Moreover, our ocean wave spectrum modification introduced to include the influences of the surface rain, allows the interpretation/investigation of the scatterometer observations in terms not only of the surface winds but also of the surface rain, defining an additional step needed to improve the wind retrievals algorithms as well as the possibility to jointly estimate wind and rain from scatterometer observations