Practitioners and users of environmental evaluation, such as evaluators in consultancies, academics, European and national policy-makers, and regulators, are invited to participate in the 6th European Environmental Evaluators Network Forum (2017 EEEN Forum). The event will take place 23-24 November 2017 at the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is hosted by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
Background
The purpose of the international Environmental Evaluators Network (EEN) is to advance the practice, policy and theory of evaluating environmental programmes, policies and other interventions. Since 2012, the European Environmental Evaluators’ Network (EEEN) has been organising forums to promote more systematic and collective learning in these areas.
2017 themes
The 2017 Forum will ask whether evaluation is evolving in line with the societal and environmental challenges policy is trying to address. Europe, in order to achieve its goal of “living well, within the limits of our planet”, will need to rely inter alia on innovation to make the transition to sustainability. Many forms of innovation will be required to turn Europe into a resource-efficient, green and low-carbon economy.
The 2017 EEEN Forum therefore invites contributions on the role of evaluating innovation in environmental protection and sustainability.The Forum will focus both on the evaluation of innovation and on innovation in evaluation approaches.
The following themes are proposed to provide a broad framework for the Forum:
1. The role of social innovation – while innovation is often thought to refer to technological solutions, awareness is growing of the role of social innovations, namely new practices and behaviours that enable society to meet their needs more sustainably. Is evaluation addressing policies and governance arrangements that stimulate new practices and behaviours and their implications for environmental protection and sustainability? Which evaluation methodologies are relevant here? Which are the factors affecting public engagement? What is the role of consumers and non-state actors in this context?
2. The role of the business sector in environmental innovation – to what extent are businesses gearing up for the required transition to turning Europe into a resource-efficient, green and low-carbon economy in line with related Europe-wide policies? In evaluating these policies how do we capture the opportunities and constraints on innovation in business practice? How do we evaluate business competitiveness and financial risk in this context? Is corporate social responsibility a useful measure here?
3. Innovations in instrument evaluation – how to design policy evaluation to ensure more connectivity between policies (e.g. between resource efficiency and decarbonisation policies or between different policy types)? Is the evaluation community focusing on the right policy linkages, on so-called nexus issues? Are there new instruments or methods to evaluate environmental damages and their different kind of compensation and/or prevention? What are the effects of market regulation? Can financial incentives improve performance?
4. Innovation in implementation – the scaling up of innovative solutions often relies on supportive policy design and effective implementation. What are the innovations in approaches to implementation that will promote the transition to sustainability? How can these be evaluated? Do the European initiatives of the Environmental Implementation Review and Environmental Compliance Assurance offer lessons in this regard? What role do regulators play?
How to participate
There are several ways you can participate in the event. You can join as a speaker, discussion leader, session organiser or participant. For more information about these roles and about how you can apply, please refer to the 2017 EEEN Forum website; www.eea.europa.eu/eeen2017
Application deadline (for speakers, discussion leaders, session organisers and participants): 31 July 2017. Notifications about acceptance and requests to confirm attendance will be sent in September.
Contact
For questions or furhter information, contact the organisers at communications@sepa.org.uk.