Enhancing the assessment of green architecture of CAP Strategic Plans
New guidelines and a Good Practice Workshop support Member States in the assessment of the combination of environment and climate instruments.
New guidelines on evaluating the green architecture of the CAP Strategic Plans offer the evaluation community a practical and structured tool to assess how Member States’ environmental and climate ambitions are being delivered. They respond to a clear need expressed by Managing Authorities and evaluators: to understand not only whether single interventions work, but how well they work together as a coherent system.
Developed under the Thematic Working Group Evaluation of environment and climate architecture, organised by the EU CAP Network, with the support of the European Evaluation Helpdesk of the CAP, the guidelines draw on a broad collaborative process.
Evaluators, researchers, national authorities and Commission officials combined a review of CAP Strategic Plans, methodological reflection, expertise on environmental and climate assessment, and evaluation design. This approach ensures that the guidance is methodologically robust, while remaining adaptable to the diverse ways in which green architecture is designed and implemented across Member States.
There is no consensually agreed definition of the green architecture in the legal acts, therefore, in the guidelines, the green architecture is understood as all CAP Strategic Plan instruments (e.g. interventions, GAECs, use of definitions, etc.) which have been designed to address the three environmental and climate objectives of the CAP (Specific Objectives (SO) 4 for climate action, SO5 to safeguard natural resources and SO6 to protect biodiversity).
Building on the Thematic Working Group activity, a Good Practice Workshop on the ‘Assessment of the green architecture of CAP Strategic Plans’ was organised on 16-17 March in Larnaca, Cyprus. At the event, which gathered participants from most Member States, the Evaluation Helpdesk provided insights from the guidelines, including how evaluators can put them into practice.
What the guidelines offer
The green architecture combines several instruments used to address climate action, natural resources and biodiversity: conditionality, eco‑schemes, agri‑environment‑climate commitments, cooperation, investments and other instruments designed by each Member State.
Evaluating this mix of instruments is often challenging because interventions interact, overlap or complement one another. The guidelines help address this complexity by offering:
- a clear structure for defining the scope of the evaluation, based on the intervention logic of each CAP Strategic Plan;
- proposed evaluation questions and factors of success for assessing effectiveness, coherence and efficiency;
- practical advice on selecting indicators, data sources and methods;
- examples of analytical approaches and expected outcomes; and
- suggestions for how findings can inform programme improvements.
Beyond describing what to assess, the guidance explains why certain analytical steps matter, such as examining complementarities or trade‑offs between instruments, to better interpret evaluation results on green architecture.
The Good Practice Workshop complemented these guidelines by showing practical examples from evaluations on green architecture already undertaken, during this programming period (e.g. Cyprus) or in the previous period (e.g. Lombardia, Emilia Romagna, IT), thereby providing the evaluation community with a clearer understanding of methodological options that exist and the benefits and limitations of different approaches.
These exchanges held during the event highlighted gaps and needs at the Member States’ level in assessing the contribution of all relevant CSP interventions towards achieving the EU climate and environmental objectives.
Why the guidelines and Good Practice Workshop matter for the evaluation community
For Managing Authorities, the guidelines, as well as inspiration from the workshop, can serve as support for drafting terms of reference, determining the level of ambition for an evaluation and deciding whether a green architecture evaluation should complement or replace evaluations of specific objectives. They also help clarify the evidence needed to determine whether the mix of instruments is functioning as intended.
For evaluators, the guidelines provide a coherent methodological reference. They set out how to build on previous work, such as effectiveness assessments carried out for individual specific objectives of the CAP, and how these analyses feed into broader assessments of coherence and efficiency.
The guidance points to relevant PMEF indicators, environmental datasets and analytical tools, while encouraging mixed‑method approaches that combine quantitative and qualitative insights.
At the same time, the Good Practice Workshop offered inspiration from other approaches to address similar problems, providing evaluators with an umbrella of options from which to choose to design an evaluation most suitable to the circumstances facing the evaluation at hand.
It is important to stress that both the guidelines and the Good Practice Workshop recognise that there is no single model of green architecture and no single way to design an evaluation. Instead, they offer a flexible approach that can be adapted to national needs. By focusing on the relationships between instruments, the guidelines make it easier to identify why certain results occur, where there are synergies, and where improvements in design or targeting may be needed.
The structured approach to coherence assessment provided by the guidelines is particularly valuable. Understanding how instruments interact internally, how they relate to other CAP Strategic Plan interventions, and how they align with environmental and climate legislation outside the CAP is essential to explaining the effectiveness assessment's findings. Similarly, the section on efficiency helps evaluators explore administrative burden, cost‑effectiveness and opportunities for simplification.
As Member States continue implementing their CAP Strategic Plans, these guidelines and the Good Practice Workshop come at an important moment. Early evaluations can already inform adjustments to the green architecture during this programming period, while later ones will provide essential evidence for the post‑2027 CAP.
By offering a shared reference for evaluation design and methodological choices, the guidelines support methodological consistency, and the Good Practice Workshop supports peer learning across the EU. For the evaluation community, they provide a practical tool that strengthens the overall quality of green architecture evaluations and helps ensure that the CAP’s environmental and climate ambitions are assessed in a meaningful and comparable way.
