How do policy makers design programmes for complex environments, and how do they know if these are successful – or not?

• Project Dates: 2016 - 2018
• Project Leader: Jeremy Phillipson
• Staff: Amy Proctor, Frances Rowe, Anne Liddon (in collaboration with Karen Scott, Exeter University)
• Sponsors: ESRC, NERC, DEFRA, BEIS, Environment Agency, Food Standards Agency

How do policy makers design programmes for complex environments, and how do they know if these are successful – or not?  Policies are difficult to design and even harder to assess. How do we know what works and why? What happens when major ‘shocks’ disrupt the policy ‘system’ such as the UK’s decision to leave the European Union?

These are some of the questions CECAN is aiming to address.

Led by Surrey University, CECAN brings together a multi-disciplinary team of policy makers, practitioners and academics  to work on evaluation challenges in the ‘NEXUS’ of food, energy, water and environment. 

Over the next two years CECAN will be tackling real world problems with policy makers through a series of case studies in policy spaces such as food, environment, rural development, marine and energy. The Centre for Rural Economy and the Policy Studies Institute are jointly leading this area of work. The case studies will be applying, and learning from, novel methods of evaluation and the challenges of evaluating policy in complex environments. 

For more information see CECAN’s website, accessed here: www.cecan.ac.uk