About the Theme
EEEN is a forum for European environmental evaluators and a part of the international Environmental Evaluators Network that has organised international conferences on an annual basis. The 1st European environmental Evaluators forum was held in Leuven, the 2nd in Stockholm and the 3rd will be held in Helsinki and will be hosted by the Finnish Environment Institute SYKE. The objective of the forum is to advance the field of environmental evaluation, defined as environmental policy and programme evaluation, through more systematic and collective learning among evaluators and evaluation users. The EEEN forums aim to bring together researchers, practitioners and users of environmental evaluation at any level and provide them with the opportunity to share views, knowledge and experiences about the influence, importance and future of environmental evaluation in their respective organisations, domains and disciplines.
Linking evaluation findings to enhancing sustainability
The theme of the 3rd EEEN forum is ‘Linking evaluation findings to enhancing sustainability’ paying particular attention to the influence of evaluations, coordination of knowledge generated by evaluations, and linking the evaluation of policy measures to long-term policy goals. Thus, the 3rd EEEN forum is focused on three sub-themes:
Significant resources have been devoted to policy evaluation research and numerous environmental evaluations have been carried out. Still it is unclear to what extent and how evaluation has affected policy decisions, and how the use of evaluation findings can be improved. This sub-theme looks for contributions addressing questions including but not limited to: What methods and measures could be used to assess the influence of evaluations? What conditions the use of evaluation knowledge? How do actors in evaluations anticipate and manage the use of evaluation findings? How could the use of evaluations be improved?
In the globalized world, policies can be evaluated at different levels from international to local.
A grand example is European Union policy, regarding which evaluations take place at the European and national levels. In theory, evaluations and their use would benefit from coordinating evaluations at different levels, although this is not necessary the case in practice. This sub-theme calls for contributions to address questions, such as: How to improve the coordination of evaluation projects or data at different levels? In what cases are international or EU-level evaluations directly usable at the national level? How can different level evaluations use same materials and share learning? Accounts of meta-evaluations are also welcomed.
Several domains of environmental policy (water quality, renewable energy, etc.) have adopted long-term policy goals that should guide the design of policy instruments at EU and national levels. Yet in practice, policy instruments often address short-term goals that emerge from day-to-day political debates, while long-term policy goals may be forgotten or diluted in process. Contributions to this sub-theme could address questions, such as: How do today’s policy measures influence and/or support the achievement of long-term goals? How could evaluations bridge the gap between long-term and short-term policy goals? What factors may hamper the production of such evaluation results or their effectiveness?
