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Report on the interviews to the key stakeholders and the first EPATEE survey
This report summarises the outcomes of the first activities produced by the EPATEE consortium in terms of stakeholders’ engagement:
- an interview with a group of key stakeholders identified at EU level, used to get a qualitative feedback and identify the first needs and priorities for the project activities;
- a survey among a larger group of stakeholders, aimed at collecting a more quantitative feedback, better understanding the needs of the EPATEE stakeholders and ranking the priorities identified in the interviews.
The surveyed stakeholders have been chosen considering their role in policy evaluation: ministries, agencies, experts, etc. The outcomes of this survey allowed a better understanding of the implementation of an energy efficiency policies evaluation process over EU Member States. Areas for improvement and ways in which the EPATEE project can support the stakolders (meetings, webinars, workshops, web platform, etc.) have been identified.
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Report on the second EPATEE survey
This report summarises the outcomes of the second survey submitted to the group of stakeholders, aimed at collecting a more quantitative feedback and a better understanding of the needs of the EPATEE stakeholders in view of the implementation of the EPATEE web-tool.
These surveys have been promoted mainly among evaluators, evaluation customers (i.e. people who commission evaluation activities), and evaluation users (i.e. people who use the results of evaluation, for example for lobbying, research purposes, etc.). It should be noted that the findings from this study are not meant to be exhaustive nor representative of the evaluation practices of all Member States. The objective was to get the views of the key target groups for the project (policy makers, evaluation customers, evaluators, evaluation users) to ensure that the EPATEE consortium has a good understanding of their needs and expectations.
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Guidelines on how to integrate evaluation into the policy cycle
Doing evaluation is not only about practical (e.g., data collection) or methodological (e.g., defining a baseline) issues. Organizational issues can be as important, and particularly when considering the planning and use of evaluation.
This report explores the connections between evaluation and the policy cycle, and how to make evaluation an integral part of policy management. As a starting point, the report briefly reminds why and how doing evaluation can help improve policies, and provide sources for general guidance on how to plan and prepare evaluations. Then, the concept of policy cycle is introduced, explaining how it can be used to plan and analyse the different phases of policy development, and analysing how evaluation can be related to it. This shows how an integrated approach can be fruitful for both, policy developments and evaluation.
Based on usual ways to describe policy cycle and evaluation process, a simplified joint representation has been developed to illustrate how both processes could interact. This integration does rarely occur naturally, due to barriers. Feedback from stakeholders enabled to characterize and structure these barriers into categories. This framework was then used to present good practices in the form of actions that can be done by persons or units in charge of evaluation within public bodies, to tackle these issues and facilitate the integration of evaluation into the policy cycle.
