Author: Blanca Casares (AEIDL)
On 30-31 March the European Evaluation Helpdesk for the CAP organised in Prague, (Czech Republic), its third good practice workshop on evaluation for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Strategic Plans (SPs) 2023-2027.
EU Member States are required to evaluate their CAP SPs during and after the programming period, to assess how each country contributes to achieving the CAP objectives and to improve the quality of the design and implementation of the future of policy making.
The workshop provided the opportunity for key evaluation stakeholders to exchange, network and assess best practices for developing evaluation plans. A total of 70 participants from 23 EU Member States attended the workshop and discussed ways to establish a robust evaluation framework. This included:
- creating clear links between a CAP Strategic Plan’s intervention logic and the respective evaluation plan;
- preparing overarching and annual operational plans;
- conducting thematic evaluations during the implementation period;
- designing evaluation questions and success factors for all evaluation criteria and considering various timelines to accommodate data availability and delivery mechanisms; and
- beyond developing an evaluation framework, determining and linking evaluation criteria, questions, factors of success and data sources to help structure and determine the main evaluation activities and initiate the process for identifying and addressing data gaps.
Participants noted that stakeholders, such as National Networks, environmental authorities and farmers, could be consulted during the design phase of the plans to capture better input in both the short and long term, such as identifying needs, deciding on evaluation criteria and key indicators, and planning the types of evaluation needed, as well as how best to disseminate the results to the right audience.
Read the workshop’s report here.