All official European Union website addresses are in the europa.eu domain.
See all EU institutions and bodiesDo something for our planet, print this page only if needed. Even a small action can make an enormous difference when millions of people do it!
When European environmental policies were first developed, many policy instruments focused on specific environmental problems. Since no single policy instrument can provide solutions to all problems, the spectrum of policies has broadened gradually to address increasingly complex environmental and health related problems. Today, many environmental policy interventions combine:
The latest EU environment action programme, the 8th EAP, provides an integrated framework for these policy interventions. It sets out the long-term ambition of ensuring wellbeing for all, while staying within the planetary boundaries
We stand more than halfway between the beginning of European-level environmental policy, which started in the early 1970s and the 2050 objective for achieving sustainability as set out by the 8th EAP. European environmental policy is recognised as one of the strongest in the world. Our environment would look quite different without it, as The European Environment Ageny's (EEA) latest assessment The European environment — state and outlook 2020 shows. Alongside such assessments the questions such as “what works?”, “how does it work?”, “at what cost?” and “what are prerequisites for making it work?” can be asked in view of improving environmental policy, its implementation and design. Policy evaluation helps to answer these questions.
Evaluations typically address different evaluation criteria. These criteria often focus on the relevance of policies, their effectiveness and efficiency, as well as their coherence, but also the added value of policies at European, national or local level. More recently, the relevance of these criteria has been recognised in the framework of EU initiatives for improving regulation, also known as the Better Regulation initiative. A range of evaluation tools and methods are available to evaluate environment policies against these criteria, for example the European Commission’s Evalsed sourcebook.
The EEA provides environmental information for policy-makers and the public, and contributes to evaluating environmental policy. Initially focusing on the effectiveness of policies (for example, the reporting on environmental measures project), the EEA’s work has evolved to also focus on:
EEA publications contributing to environmental policy evaluation are available here.
For references, please go to https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/policy/intro or scan the QR code.
PDF generated on 16 Oct 2024, 09:54 AM
Engineered by: EEA Web Team
Software updated on 26 September 2023 08:13 from version 23.8.18
Software version: EEA Plone KGS 23.9.14
Document Actions
Share with others