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Current evaluation practices and related challenges of policy evaluation and bridging ex-post and ex-ante in Europe

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Kelsey van Maris
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In the context of economic evaluations for environment and climate policies, there is a need to understand the current practices and challenges in conducting ex-ante and ex-post policy evaluations and in bridging both. This study can allow to understand the challenges in bridging ex-post and ex-ante as only a few practices currently exist and identifying ways how bridging can be improved.
This is illustrated by the Repository of current evaluation practices ex-post and ex-ante, and combining both, published in the Pattern website, where the study, which involves policymakers and policy evaluation practitioners, sheds light on current practices of linking ex-post and ex-ante assessments to create information flows in both directions.
[Check the Library to download and read the full document]

With this purpose, we developed a meta-analysis of relevant ex-ante, ex-post and combined evaluations, together with literature review. At hand it’s about sharing experiences on ex-post/ex-ante and bridging both, by giving an overview of existing practices so that policymakers and practitioners can learn from these. In addition D1.1 gives suggestions on areas for improvement, describing the meta-analysis, challenges and areas for improvement on bridging-ex-post and ex-ante and gives the results we can see in the previous document Excel already published.
[Check the Library to download and read the full document]

We have to admit that, during the work, we found a lack of practices on bridging ex-post and ex-ante. Indeed, multiple areas for improvement are identified for each economic appraisal process. These needs include having a link between ex-ante and ex-post experts and practitioners, promoting open data access, improving communication on complex ex-ante models and reducing uncertainty at data collection/monitoring stage and when selecting the evaluation approach. To this end, “guidelines on bridging” for policymakers and practitioners are being developed along the project. These guidelines will include the PATTERN cases along with an example of a comparative analysis, where ex-ante and ex-post data from the Belgian and Dutch building sector are compared to understand deviations in hindsight.

In conclusion, this repository and D1.1 were the first step we made in PATTERN to start drafting guidelines for bridging ex-post and ex-ante. It would be good to initiate discussions with policymakers and stakeholders, to see what they expect from bridging, what they can learn from it, and what hampers them in applying this. Later on in the project, we can then have a follow-up discussion based on the guidelines we are further developing and a practical example on comparative analysis (applied to emissions in the built environment).