European Commission - DG BUDGET

This study is designed to help delineating the area of relevance of CEA in the real life of policy and programme evaluation, and the categories of evaluations (or preferably of evaluation questions) that are out of the reach of CEA, The Commission aims to highlight and to synthesise the most significant efficiency related conclusions that have arisen from its evaluations over the last years, To carry out this assignement, Eureval proposes a desk analysis of evaluation reports in order to select cost-effectiveness type conclusions, the selection of two samples (strong CEA conclusions on one

The purpose of the study was to synthesise useful information from existing evaluations by answering two main questions: (1) How relevant, effective, efficient and sustainable were the Community funded programmes and policies under the 2000-2006 Financial Perspectives? (2) What lessons learned are relevant to the review of EU spending?

The European Parliament invited the Commission to pay special attention, inter alia, to the coherence of the Agency activity with EU policies, to the broader EU added value of agencies outputs in their respective area of activity, to the relevance of the Agency model in implementing or contributing to EU policies. In response to the Parliament, the Commission launched this meta-study in an accountability perspective with a special focus on the rationale of establishing / maintaining agencies. This study covered 25 European agencies financed by the European budget plus Europol.

The evaluation scope covers the 26 european agencies. EU Agencies have been developed on a case by case basis following the evolution of the growth of European policy competencies.

Eureval-C3E organised and conducted a half-day workshop on the quality criteria for an evaluation, more precisely on examples of good practice.

This seminar lasted one day and gathered 35 persons. It included a case study on the evaluation of fisheries agreements.

An expert of the Centre was invited to present the results of an international piece of research related to evaluation across levels of government.

Eureval-C3E ran about 20 training seminars gathering evaluation managers within DG AGRI and DG BUDGET. The seminars dealt with the evaluation process and its management. It extended to evaluation techniques with special days devoted to cost-benefit analysis, questionnaire surveys, multicriteria analysis, econometric models, case studies, statistical analysis, geographic information systems. Some seminars involved experts from the World Bank, OECD and various European countries.

The goals of our intervention were to encourage the use of an analytical approach of evaluation (using the logical frame), in the perspective of the implementation of the new management system adopted by the EC ; to spread evaluation techniques, getting trainees to get familiar with the commissioning of external evaluations and the management of results.

Within the framework of the reflections of the SEM 2000 expert group on evaluation and monitoring systems, Eureval-C3E analysed the role of evaluation and its interaction with policy management, regulatory aspects and the logistics of evaluation, the contents of available evaluation reports and the use of evaluation.