This blogpost highlights some of the points raised in a policy brief, New Directions: A public goods approach to agricultural policy post-Brexit. Following the Brexit referendum, the mantra “public monies for public goods” has been increasingly heard, especially in relation to agricultural and environmental policy.
The course covers the main strategies, approaches and methods that an evaluator or evaluation commissioner might want to use to tackle the challenges of complexity social science and policy evaluation.
Household food security is a classic complex system. Countries that are food secure when viewed at country-scale may nevertheless have considerable food security problems at household scale.
In development studies, one wants an evaluation team to face up to the challenge of combining surveys with semi-structured interview data. In this seminar I explain and show how these linkages are made with concrete data about villages in Bangladesh and India.
Here in CECAN, a lot of time is spent considering and analysing policies, projects and interventions. We also think about methodologies, approaches and systems that we can adopt to do this analysis in the best way possible.
Phil Haynes is Professor of Public Policy and researches and teaches public policy and management, as applied to a variety of contemporary circumstances. His research focuses on the application of complex systems theory, often using applied statistical methods. His research has been funded by the ESRC and the government and voluntary sector.
Along with several lead and co-authors, as part of a British Ecological Society Agricultural Ecology Group convened workshop held in December 2017, a report has been produced entitled “Finding the Common Ground”, which sets out an ecological perspective on how future agricultural policy should develop as a consequence, and in relation to, Brexit.
The concept of the Water-Energy-Food nexus has been in vogue since being identified as part of the ‘perfect storm’ of drivers on society by the UN in 2011.
Last month, Carillion, one of the largest companies in the UK which regularly entered into contracts with government to deliver public infrastructure and services, went into liquidation. Since then, public-private partnerships (PPP), and their pantomime villain superstars – private finance initiatives (PFI) – have received an unprecedented level of criticism. The Guardian Opinion section – and my love-hate relationship with it – has gone into overdrive!
CECAN has published a new paper, ‘Computational Modelling of Public Policy: Reflections on Practice.’
Professionals in evaluation pay a lot of attention to how to evaluate. We are less thoughtful about exactly what to evaluate, and why. Stakeholders’ interests and questions tend to determine what will be useful to focus on at a particular point in time.
CECAN develops, tests and enhances methods to deal with complexity in policy evaluation, trying to advance research, policy and evaluation practice. To ensure that these methods will influence an ever widening audience, CECAN has now launched a syllabus for building capacity and supporting the application of complexity sensitive evaluation nationally and internationally.
Policy evaluation is about assessing the value of policies, but too little attention, it seems to me, is paid to the meaning of “value” in all this. The English word “value”, of course, has multiple meanings that include numerical (e.g. “a parameter value”), economic (e.g. “good value”) and ethical (e.g. “a value judgment”).
CECAN was represented at the recent Social Innovation Conference in Lisbon, by Professor Liz Varga of Cranfield University.
The aim of the case study was to explore, via CECAN’s approach to participatory systems mapping, the energy trilemma policy landscape. Specifically, it was to map relevant policies, their interaction, context, and impact on the trilemma, and to highlight: the impacts of policies on the three ‘legs’ of the trilemma; potential common and/or contradictory aims and mechanisms amongst policies; and uncertainty and evidence gaps.
On the 23rd and 24th November 2017 members of the CECAN team, Pete Barbrook-Johnson, Clare Twigger-Ross and myself attended the EEEN conference in the beautiful surroundings of the Royal Society in Edinburgh. Facilitated by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), civil servants from environment agencies, consultants, practitioners and academics came together to share experiences and ideas for the future of environmental policy evaluation.
This presentation continues the CECAN series on realist research and evaluation and their use in relation to complexity. It focuses on the issue of causation.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations in 2015 puts follow-up and review processes at the heart of global and national efforts to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The University of Surrey has been awarded a three year RCUK Innovation Fellowship by ESRC.
This month CECAN proudly hosted an International Symposium on complexity approaches to evaluate global nexus policy challenges, at Barnett Hill Hotel in Surrey.
As we all know CECAN is pioneering, testing and promoting innovative policy evaluation approaches and methods across Nexus domains through a series of “real-life” case study projects – it’s about measuring best value in complex, inter-connecting systems.
I first heard of Qualitative Comparative Analysis from Prof David Byrne at an early CECAN meeting and it seemed to address key issues we faced when evaluating 13 very different interventions across England designed to improve community resilience to flooding.
As the first step in developing my CECAN research project titled ‘The Visual Representation of Complex Systems: A Typology of Visual Codes for Systemic Relations’ I was thrilled to have the opportunity to engage with the Relating Systems Thinking and Design community last month.
We were delighted to run a successful policy evaluation workshop last week with policy teams and analysts working on energy security and the wider energy ‘trilemma’ (decarbonisation, prices, and security), at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
New methodological perspectives, from economics and other disciplines, and research into practice are suggesting more effective approaches to regulation that could also avoid escalatory pressures towards red tape.
The complexity of sustainability is immense, yet many policies and plans now have sustainability as an aim. While it is difficult to empirically evaluate sustainability outcomes, it is possible to evaluate the process of decision-making to identify if decision-making is becoming more informed and working towards balancing social, economic and environmental priorities.
September saw a successful collaboration between CECAN and Brighton University, who hosted a Dynamic Pattern Synthesis (DPS) summer school.
We’d like to extend our thanks to Professor Saville Kushner who gave an excellent talk on behalf of CECAN at the Food Standards Agency on 9th October.
Contact: Frances Rowe and Adam Hejnowicz DEFRA and the Rural Development Programme for England: Evaluating complex policy at a time of dynamic change. From 2016 to 2018 DEFRA worked with the CECAN case study team, led by Newcastle and York universities, to help inform...
Contact: Amy Proctor, Newcastle University CECAN Case Study: Enforcement on Waste Crime - Environment Agency Between 2016 and 2018, the CECAN case study team, led by Newcastle University, worked with the Environment Agency to develop a new approach to their evaluation...