Monitoring and evaluation of any policy is based on belief that citizens or taxpayers must get more for less which can only be achieved through relevant policies and their effective implementation. European Commission started discussion on Monitoring and Evaluation for Common Agricultural Policy post 2013 which will lead to preparation of regulations and other implementing legislative. But more important than legislation proper and transparent policy preparation is which must be supported with strong evaluation. Both planning and evaluation are framed with culture and culture is basically responsible for citizens and taxpayers happiness.
Monitoring and Evaluation of the CAP post 2013
Europe needs to focus its development plans to smaller number of objectives with clear performance indicators and to fewer measures with clear understanding of targets to be achieved. This may lead to less common objectives and indicators which will show performance of the policy on European level while member states should be able to design their own specific objectives and plans. This may lead to more flexible evaluation procedures at the program level while better presentation of achieved on the European level. This will not hurt evaluation quality but may only simplify procedures being too costly and complicated at the moment.
Fever indicators will not hurt the quality of evaluation but will lead to better innovation and especially to clearer focus of evaluators and implementing authorities. Selecting of indicators on the other hand needs to be carefully done in the whole process of programing and evaluation in order to represent performance of the program.
Content of evaluations and timing do not need to be clearly defined in early stages of policy preparation. Content of evaluations needs to be designed later in end of the planning and in implementing phases of the program. This will improve quality of evaluations being more focused to thematic and territorial impact of interventions while still having guiding and monitoring purposes. More intensity needs to be focused to scoping as a first stage of evaluation which should be led by program objectives and needs of each Member state in order to achieve its competitiveness.
Agricultural policy achieved a great lesson by introducing common evaluation guidelines but this system need to be further developed especially by developing clear understanding what are the European Union level evaluation needs and what can must be used and managed at the Member state level. Common monitoring and evaluation framework needs to become a guideline in a greater deal than regulation leading towards clear definition of our common indicators and having more flexibility on member state level to be able to use results of evaluation for planning and implementation purposes.