Assessment of the green architecture of CAP Strategic Plans

Organised by the EU CAP Network with the support of the European Evaluation Helpdesk for the CAP, this Good Practice Workshop focused on building capacity, sharing practical experiences, and fostering collaboration among evaluation stakeholders to address methodological and practical challenges encountered when assessing the green architecture of CAP Strategic Plans.

The workshop presented the best approaches to assess the effectiveness, coherence, and efficiency of the green architecture of CAP Strategic Plans, using examples from Cyprus, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands. The presentations emphasised the need to evaluate the combined effects and interactions of all green instruments rather than individual assessments, and to consider both intended and unintended effects.

To understand the interactions of green instruments, early evaluations of the green architecture are particularly useful to analyse relevance and coherence, analysing how the different instruments are intended to work together, detecting any weaknesses and undertaking corrective measures in the CSP design. Later-stage evaluations are useful for analysing effectiveness and efficiency, while coherence can be assessed more evidence-based by examining the extent to which GA instruments interacted as intended.

During the event, Dimitris Skuras walked the audience through the distinction between a Specific Objective (SO) evaluation and a green architecture evaluation, emphasising that the latter examines the combined effects and interactions across SO4-SO6. He outlined the scope of a green architecture evaluation based on the Evaluation Helpdesk guidelines ‘Evaluation of the green architecture of the CAP Strategic Plans’ and introduced potential evaluation questions focused on effectiveness, coherence and efficiency.

Several persistent challenges were identified, focusing on methodological ones, in particular, attribution and causal analysis, data-related constraints, low farmer feedback and survey participation and institutional and capacity constraints. Specifically, assessing policy coherence remains difficult because of the complex interactions between GA instruments and other EU and national policies, which makes it hard to assess synergies, trade-offs and overall policy consistency.

When discussing possible solutions, participants suggested implementing a phased evaluation approach that starts with relevance and coherence and deepens once more data is available. Participants also suggested strengthening the use of available data and analytical approaches, including combining different data sources and methods,  making better use of existing data by combining sources and methods, paying more attention to how instruments interact in practice, and better integrating the territorial dimension through farm-level and location-based analysis.

The priorities of the evaluation framework for assessing the green architecture should focus on defining the scope of the evaluation with key evaluation criteria, structuring a clear timeline, ensuring the involvement and coordination of relevant actors, and ensuring data availability.