What is the best way to evaluate Rural Development Programmes?

Background and Objective

Evaluation is becoming more and more important. National programmes are often EU co-financed. Evaluation is legally required for EU co-financed programmes. There are broad theoretical evaluation concepts. But practically, we find a failure of those concepts because of missing objectives (like nailing jelly to a tree) or missing or qualitatively insufficient data. Evaluation forms part of the policy cycle. Politicians expect short-term results, even if the measures’ impact needs more time. Our objective is to develop suitable methods between the two referred poles.

Approach

 We check qualitative and quantitative methods with the available data pool concerning their suitability for evaluation purposes. We are engaged in discussions on the EU level and German networks for methodological and organisational improvements. Furthermore, we support exchanges with evaluators in other policy fields.

Data and Methods

 We are working with micro-data, i.e., farm accountancy data, data of the Integrated Administration and Control System or the Paying Agencies and agricultural statistics. Qualitative data are mainly based on own surveys, like expert interviews. We use various analytical methods, i.e., matching or regression methods. We see the combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods as a promising approach. A recent example is the implementation cost analysis within the 7-state-evaluation.

Preliminary Results

We publish relevant methodological results in scientific journals. Furthermore, we organise evaluation workshops. We participate in discussions on the EU level with comments, as reviewers or providing examples of best practices.

During the last years we have made various contributions to "Aktuelle Praktiken", published by the Monitoring and Evaluation Network Germany: Compilation of Aktuelle Praktiken.