Contact: Pete Barbrook Johnson CECAN Contracts for Difference Case Study – BEIS CECAN team members provided expert input in the evaluation work conducted by BEIS and contractors on the Contracts for Difference policy. Completed in 2018, CECAN supported as a ‘critical...
Contact: Amy Proctor, Newcastle University CECAN Bovine TB Case Study – DEFRA Defra are currently developing an evaluation framework to guide their evaluation of the overall Bovine TB Strategy. CECAN have been operating as a ‘critical friend’ in this process, with...
We’d like to extend our thanks to Professor David Hunter who gave an excellent talk at BEIS on 12th September.
It’s been a month since we launched ‘A Whole New World: Funding and Commissioning in Complexity’ and the response has been incredible. Over 120 people came to the two launch events, and more than 1000 people read the report online in the first week. We’ve also started to have some excellent conversations about how to take this work forward.
It would be naive and, potentially, ill-advised to have evaluation solely drive policy direction. Good, open, evidence-backed policy, however, does need to be informed by evaluation results and insights. My CECAN Fellowship provided me with a rare opportunity to investigate how evaluation is applied in real life within a government department – in this case Defra – and how it can be used to plan for future policymaking.
Defra are currently developing an evaluation framework to guide their evaluation of the overall Bovine TB Strategy.
CECAN team members have been providing expert input in the current evaluation work being conducted by BEIS and contractors on the Contracts for Difference policy.
CECAN team members have been providing expert advice and guidance to members of the Environment Agency’s Evidence, Assessment and Evaluation team
On 19th July CECAN held the first of two joint and linked workshops with DEFRA.
CECAN PhD Researcher, Anna Kaxira, from the Policy Studies Institute at the University of Westminster, recently attend the CIED Summer School.
CECAN partner Professor Liz Varga of Cranfield University, recently attended the M2D 2017 Annual Conference on Decision Making Under Uncertainty.
We are pleased to introduce a new member of the CECAN team. Joanna Boehnert joins us as a CECAN Fellow.
Pete Barbrook-Johnson, Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute at the University of Westminster & Knowledge Integrator Research Fellow at the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) at the University of Surrey.
CECAN hosted a seminar at BEIS on 11th July, with Helen Wilkinson of Risk Solutions and Harry Walton.
CECAN recently held a seminar with Clare Twigger-Ross and Owen White from Collingwood Environmental Planning.
It is over two years since Ofwat set increasing trust in water as its key objective for its 2015 five year business plan.To establish what has happened since, I interviewed 19 senior and influential figures across all parts of the water sector. I am seeking wider perspectives via a survey (click HERE to participate) and hope this article will stimulate you to take part.
The ‘theory of change’ evaluation strategy (described in the Magenta book) was developed to help tackle evaluation of complex multi-level, multi-intervention initiatives.
The complex socio-technical arenas (nexus issues) that government seeks to improve (e.g. health, food, water, safety, infrastructure) are not driven by a single factor or consequence.
CECAN exhibited at the UKES Conference on 10th-11th May with the primary goal of making strong connections in the evaluation community.
CECAN hosted a seminar on Theory of Change and how best to design one, at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 16th May.
CECAN would like to extend thanks to Jan Kwakkel who took time out of his busy schedule to deliver a seminar to a large group of civil servants working in nexus policy areas.
This webinar is the second part of a series on Realist Methodology for the Centre for Evaluation of Complexity across the Nexus.
Numerous evaluations of natural environment policy and practice are commissioned by the UK and EU government in order to inform, develop and improve.
The range of methods available to produce useful, credible and rigorous evidence in evaluation is growing but selecting the right method or combination of methods can be difficult.
Theory of Change (TOC) is not a novel evaluation tool in itself. As a member of a family of theory based approaches to outcome evaluation it has become a key approach to assessing the outcomes of complex interventions where implementation strands are multiple, causal paths are not straightforward and feedback loops do not lend themselves to a linear cause-effect analysis.
Decision making on complex systems requires coming to grips with irreducible uncertainty. In the literature, there is an emerging consensus that any decision regarding a complex system should be robust with respect to the various uncertainties. A plan is robust if its expected performance is only weakly affected by deep uncertainty.
A couple of days ago, a DEFRA policy official told me that the uncertainty over EU exit was creating a fertile environment for evaluation, as champions try to ensure their favoured policies have a place in the forthcoming landscape, post Brexit. This struck me as interesting, and I made a note of it.
CEP over the last 10 years (2006-2016) has undertaken an extensive range of evaluations in the natural environment arena
The CECAN team would like to extend thanks to Professor Brian Castellani for his engaging discussions on case-based approaches to addressing complexity in nexus issues at his seminar on 23rd February 2017.
Sustainable Development and its relative Sustainability, concepts which have a rich history of appeal and animosity, have nevertheless become the dominant conversation framing environment-development policy in recent decades.